Data Analysis Fundamentals: Brake Pressure
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Brake Pressure
02.23
| 00:00 | - One of the common areas that a novice driver will throw away most of their potential lap time is in the braking area. |
| 00:06 | So understandably it's helpful to have a way of analysing how the driver is performing here. |
| 00:13 | While it's certainly helpful to have brake pressure data for a complete picture of what's going on with the brake performance, a lot of information about the driver's braking habits can be deduced from the longitudinal G force channel or the speed channels which we'll already have access to. |
| 00:28 | In a perfect world, we'd want to have an individual hydraulic pressure sensor on the front and rear brake circuits because this allows us to analyse the brake pressure as well as the brake bias front to rear. |
| 00:40 | This is useful at optimising the brake performance however that specific topic is a little outside the scope of this particular course and instead we'll be focusing on how the driver uses the brakes. |
| 00:52 | Unfortunately adding brake pressure sensors to your car does require a little bit of work since the sensors need to be plumbed into the hydraulic system. |
| 01:00 | Obviously we want to be 100% certain there's no chance of a sensor installation resulting in a leak that could affect the safety of our braking system. |
| 01:10 | Once the sensors are installed, they can be wired directly to your datalogger or into an aftermarket ECU and sent to the logger over CAN. |
| 01:18 | On many late model cars, there may already be brake pressure data available as part of the ABS system and this may be available on the factory CAN bus. |
| 01:27 | This can simplify your logging system as it doesn't require you to add sensors but getting this information may require reverse engineering of the CAN bus and that's beyond the scope of this course. |
| 01:38 | Our 86 development car is a good case in point where brake pressure is available on the factory CAN bus. |
| 01:44 | In this case, the brake pressure data is just a raw value so it isn't scaled to represent a true pressure in units such as PSI. |
| 01:52 | However it's still valuable data to use in a comparative sense. |
| 01:56 | If brake pressure data is too tricky to integrate with your logging system, then another simpler option is to add a brake switch instead. |
| 02:04 | Almost every car will already have a brake switch to activate the tail lights when the driver hits the brakes. |
| 02:10 | And it's easy enough to integrate into your logger. |
| 02:12 | Of course this isn't going to give you the full story but it's a nice addition to the existing longitudinal G force and GPS speed data. |
