Race Capture Pro - Open Sourced Cheap Data Acquisition?

[Tanj]

http://www.indiegogo.com/RaceCapture?c=home - Initial funding link

http://www.autosportlabs.net/RaceCapture - Main website

Ran across a link to this today. Looks fairly interesting. $300 for what appears to be a pretty full featured data acquisition system. Did a search and noticed no one had posted about it yet. My only concern would be the quality of the data analysis software but that's also something I could see improving with time.

[RacerBill]

I visited the both websites and found no information about ordering. the ideiegogo website is a website where they are looking for initial funding to get the product up and running. Bleeding edge?

[Tanj]

The indiegogo is the initial funding setup and if you look at the funding levels you can see delivery dates for the hardware. Clearly it's a brand new product for them although it appears they have been running hardware in their Lemons/Chump car and have been beta testing hardware with some local racers.

[ShelbyRacer]

This looks like a promising system. I'm just not sure about getting in on the front-end of something like this.

[GTIspirit]

I too have been looking for some inexpensive DAQ options. I've identified two options:

IOx from JBPerf, alas, no SD logging capability, doesn't look like it will ever happen. But if you're running an MS3, this looks quite promising because the MS3 will log the data acquired by the IOx. But this isn't open source.

Arduino datalogging shield, with How-to. There is also a GPS-Shield and due to the open source nature of the Arduino, it should be relatively easy to combine the two. This might be my winter project.

[brent picasso]

Hi Everyone - This is Brent Picasso, the Founder of Autosport Labs / Creator of the open source Race Capture Pro system. Thanks for sharing our project!

Race Capture Pro is brand new, yes- and we've been testing and developing it extensively. Worth noting, is that unlike a lot of crowd funding projects that have to spin up a manufacturing and fulfillment capability from scratch, we already have that capability and expertise in house. After years of developing, manufacturing and fulfilling the Megajolt project, we're launching Race Capture Pro as our next Project!

Check out our videos, and let me know if you have any questions about the system, or if we can help in any way. Thank you.

[GTIspirit]

Hi Everyone - This is Brent Picasso, the Founder of Autosport Labs / Creator of the open source Race Capture Pro system. Thanks for sharing our project!

....

Check out our videos, and let me know if you have any questions about the system, or if we can help in any way. Thank you.

Hmmm, the capability to control some outputs sounds promising and might sway my decision towards the RaceCapture. I'd be interested to see what these Lua scripts look like to say control a PWM output based on rpm and coolant temperature for example.

It is mildly disappointing that support is for a 10Hz GPS receiver, not 20Hz, but that's not a dealbreaker since the device also includes an accelerometer.

[brent picasso]

depending on what you want to do, the script could look like this:

temp = readAnalog(3)
setPWMDutyCycle(2, temp / 250 * 100)

--or--

temp = readAnalog(3)
if (temp < 50) setPWMDutyCycle(2,30)
elseif (temp < 100) setPWMDutyCycle(2, 40)
elseif (temp < 150) setPWMDutyCycle(2, 50)
else setPWMDutyCycle(2, 80)

That should give you an idea.

So yes: you can use RaceCapture to do things like remap sensors, activate fans, pumps (e.g. intercooler sprayers), active aerodynamics, change logging rate on the fly based on user defined logic- many things are possible. It's truly data acquisition *and* control.

[GTIspirit]

LOL, my credit card company suspected fraud when the charges through Indiegogo.com were processed for DataAddict and Bluetooth packages. Something about a few people fraudulently running up charges through Indiegogo.com. So they wanted to verify my charges were legitimate. I look forward to when the product and code is available. The product looks great, I'm just hoping the code isn't spaghetti C-code. It would certainly be a lot more user friendly with disciplined functions and library sub-functions.

[brent picasso]

Thanks for joining our campaign!

I like that you're interested in what's under the hood So I feel the firmware is pretty good! Maybe not as beautiful as the red anodizing but modular and intentionally designed. After all, its also our personal resume!

[GTIspirit]

While pretty things are nice to look at, it's what's under the hood that gets me excited.