ECU and Data Acquisition

Quote:

Originally Posted by backformore

I posted something under the Honda section but thought I would post it here too.

I was sure I had seen something in the past about getting some data from the ECU into the data acq system (mine is Traqmate). The obvious candidates would be water temp, rpm, and TPS if your ECU uses these values.

Has anyone tried this or have ideas about the practicality/wisdom of doing so?

Thanks.

Tracking water temperature would be useful in analyzing engine performance, and to posibly diagnose failures. rpm, throttle position, brake pressure, steering angle are all useful tools to analyze car and driver performance. If they were not useful, F1, IRL, NASCAR, Grand-Am, ALMS teams would not be spending mega bucks on equipement and engineers to interpret the data.

The question is how much time and money do you have to spend on data acquisition, and determining where your biggest bang for the buck will be.

If you are just a weekend warrior, with just yourself or one or two friends helping you, you don't really have much time during a weekend to spend on data analysis. That being said, analyzing some data can be very helpful. Basic data would be speed, lateral acceleration, and inline acceleration. Lap to lap comparisons can be very helpful. For this, you will need a GPS driven system with accelerometers. A system that has interfaces to differnet types of ECU would be helpful to acquire additional data such as RPM, throttle position, temperatures, etc.

There is one more type of data that in the last two years has come into the reach of the weekend racer - video. The addition of video to data has taken driver development to a new level. For instance, by looking at inline g's, one can determine when you apply brakes, and compare that to other laps. But having video synced to the data will be able to show you visually where you were on the track when you applied them. Turn in points and acceleration points can be determined as well. A friend of mine installed a data/video acquisition system in his track day car, and after looking at only two sessions, he was able to lower his best lap time at Mid-Ohio by a full second.

Video can also be used to analyze driving habits, good and bad. But back to your original post, additional data can be useful if it is available. One might be able to correlate increasing lap times to a rise in water temperature, for example. I would say that this information is good if it is presented by the software in a clear, understandable manner, and at a reasonable cost.

Anything can be acquired with the right amount of bucks. For instance, I was working with a brake pad manufacturer who wanted to acquire brake pressure data, to be able to analyze brake pad compound performance. Adding brake pressure data to acceleration/deceleration and braking distances can show if a new compound was actually better or if the driver was just pressing harder on the pedal. Now brake pressure sensors are not mega bucks, but do add to the cost of a system.

Please PM me if you would like some additional insight.