Hello - Opel GT LeMons Racer from Caliornia

[m610]

Like the title says, I race an Opel GT (1969) in the 24 Hours of LeMons. I started doing this in 2010, meaning the car and our team are in their 7th year of racing. We never thought we'd be doing this for over 6 years.

I'm interested in data acquisition in general. I do a bit of that in real life, as a job. Years ago I started building a system for my Honda to do that. It was based on a PC specifically made for the automotive environment and had a National Instruments analog and digital I/O card in it. I had the basic hardware assembled and was well into the software before LeMons came along and ruined everything.

Last winter I build an Arduino-based module to monitor the gauges in the Tinyvette, our race car. It works nicely and now I'm working on another module that will monitor fuel flow rates. Not only would that information be useful, but it could keep us from running out of gas. The current fuel gauge setup is nearly useless in a high-G environment.

Of course, there's the RaceCapture option. My reasons for not going that route before now have been:

1. Cost, it's already difficult to fund even a LeMons race car.
2. Confusion, I can't figure out exactly which RaceCapture product or products I would need.
3. I like to build my own things, when not too impractical.

Regarding cost, the above Arduino project ended up costing about $175 before it was all done, so even home-brew isn't cheap, and given the many other capabilities of the RaceCapture systems, they look like a great bargain.

Here's what I'd really like to do. (Keep in mind this is an old car, pre-OBDII, pre-DOS, pre-CP/M)

1. Monitor the gauges and if any are in the "bad" alert the driver using a shift light.
2. Monitor the fuel flow rate sensor (pulse output) and once xx gallons have been used alert the driver.
3. Push button to reset the fuel level monitor.
4. Relay all the above info to me in the pits.
5. GPS, speed, lateral Gs, lap times, and all that would be fun, too, but are a lower priority for me at the moment, although I figure these will be the things that will most interest my drivers.

It would be nice if the manuals were available for downloading. That would help answer a lot of my questions about product capabilities, programming, etc.

Mike

[rdoherty]

Hi Mike! Fellow Lemons racer here, from Hella Shitty Racing (E30 pickup car). It's been fun racing against you guys all these years

For the most part RCP can do everything you would like it to do. Some will require a bit of elbow grease and wiring, but I think it's doable.

RaceCapture/Pro can connect to any 0-5v sensor, pulse sensors and has 3 GPIOS. You can easily have RCP monitor gauges and turn on a LED or light if something is wrong. We do that in our E30. RaceCapture/Pro watches engine temp, oil pressure and battery. If any are out of range it turns on a LED on our dash. It requires some custom Lua scripting, and we have examples for that in our wiki: https://wiki.autosportlabs.com/RaceCapt ... ator_Light

You could probably monitor fuel flow, calculating amount of fuel can be done too. This would be done via Luascript. The only drawback is if RCP is restarted (like due to the kill switch being turned off or the car dying), RCP will lose its state and start 'fresh'.

To reset the fuel level monitoring, you could hook up a button to RCP and when its pressed, clear the fuel information.

All these channels, whether coming from actual sensors or generated by Luascript, are sent automatically to Podium if RCP has the 3G telemetry module, or you have a tablet or phone with cellular connected via BT transmitting data. The phone/tablet can also be a digital dashboard in the car showing gauges or laptimes, etc.

Hope that helps! We have lots of documentation on our wiki here if you want to read more: https://wiki.autosportlabs.com/RaceCapturePro

[m610]

Thanks, Ryan, and right back at you RE racing. It's been great.

Scripting doesn't scare me. Actually, I'm glad it is available.

I figured I'd have to make an I/O board like I did for the Arduino gauge project. Each input would require a resistor divider and maybe a filter capacitor. Maybe too an output driver for the shift light.

Too bad the unit does not store at least some values in non-volatile memory. I have built a UPS for my camera systems before. I guess I could to that for this project too, if John Pagel blesses that.

Mike

[brentp]

Hi Mike,

Thanks for sharing your ideas. Scratching similar itches is what got us started too, so we totally understand. As ryan pointed out, our system is open and extensible, on top of the tons of features we have both in the hardware and app.

Indeed, it doesn't come cheaply, as most of our design is around protection circuitry to have it survive the harsh automotive environment.

What we always suggest when people want to extend the system is to build CAN bus extension modules, which can offer limitless possibilities. We have great support for CAN bus messaging in Lua, so you can go crazy there.

Cheers!