Data Analysis Fundamentals: Step 1: Set up Data Analysis System
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Step 1: Set up Data Analysis System
48.43
| 00:00 | - Step 1 is the configuration of the entire logging system. |
| 00:04 | So that is everything from physically mounting the logger in the car, also all of the wiring and the power supply and everything to it. |
| 00:11 | But also making sure the electronic configuration of the logger is correct so that we're getting and recording all the data that we intend to on track. |
| 00:19 | One of the biggest frustrations in motorsport data logging that everyone will come into contact with at some point in their career is the logger not recording what either we want or what we expect from it. |
| 00:30 | This can be as simple as one of the sensors not giving the readings we're expecting or it could be as bad as not giving us any data at all because the data logger never started recording in the first place. |
| 00:42 | So this is a really crucial first step, you need to give yourself plenty of time to go through calmly, you don't want to be doing this setup for the first time when you get to the track, you don't want to be unloading the car off the trailer and then thinking OK now I'm going to configure my logger, this is really something that you want to be spending time on in your garage or workshop before you head to the track because it really is worth spending that time to go through and doing it calmly and making sure everything's done right because otherwise it can be a complete waste of time from a data logging perspective. |
| 01:11 | For the Video VBOX, it's largely a self contained logger, apart from the video outputs that we'll go through a little bit later. |
| 01:16 | The first step is just making sure this thing is physically attached to the car, it's secure so it's not going to move around the cabin or get tangled up with everything. |
| 01:24 | The video VBOX we've got fitted to this car is just mounted to the centre console which is just behind me in the seat here. |
| 01:31 | Part of the reason it's there is just to make sure it's easily accessible so we can get the SD card out of it, access the buttons and connections on it easily. |
| 01:39 | As I said, you want to make sure that the physical logger is mounted in the cabin in a way it can't move around but also there's two cameras that we're using with this system as well, one that's front looking and one that's looking back at the driver to help give us a little bit more context. |
| 01:53 | So they obviously need to be mounted to the windscreen as well and they provide suction cups with that which makes it really really easy. |
| 01:59 | There's no other physical sensors that we're using on this system. |
| 02:03 | There is an option to integrate CAN data that we can take from the CAN bus, things like throttle position or brake pressure or anything else you've got available in your CAN bus, that is an option to integrate it into this particular system, that's not the way we've got this system configured, it's really configured as simply as possible to give it a representative setup of how someone might use it to get up and going really quickly. |
| 02:25 | So apart from the cameras and the basic mounting of the system, the only other thing we need to put in there is a power supply, which we've got running to the car. |
| 02:32 | There is the option to run the VBOX from battery but we've got it mounted to the power supply of the car which makes it a little bit easier. |
| 02:40 | It's just one less thing to have to remember to charge or turn on when you want to do your logging. |
| 02:44 | Before we get into the configuration of the logger, I just want to show you guys a little bit of what some of the outputs look like that'll give you a little bit more context as we head through the configuration process, just so you have a bit more of an understanding of what the end result's going to look like. |
| 02:56 | I think it'll help you get a little bit more out of the initial configuration. |
| 02:59 | One of the things that's a little bit unique about the Video VBOX system is it stores both its datalog file and its video files in the same storage location, often systems you'll have the logged data maybe stored in the onboard memory of the logger that you download separately to the camera which may be on an SD card. |
| 03:20 | In the case of a Video VBOX, everything is stored on one SD card which is actually quite nice because it means everything is stored in one place. |
| 03:26 | We've got two different pieces of information coming out of the logger. |
| 03:29 | We've got the logged data itself which is something we'll go through in detail looking at inside of the analysis software but we've also got this video file and the Video VBOX essentially is putting a link between those things so it's allowing us to look at the video and the data in sync which is really the main crux of the advantage of using something like the Video VBOX system where it does that synchronisation for you. |
| 03:50 | One of the great things about the Video VBOX, in the video file that it outputs, is it actually overlays automatically some of the critical log data information. |
| 03:58 | And there's quite a lot of configuration on that that we'll go through in a second. |
| 04:01 | The great thing about it putting out a separate video file is that it means if you want to, you can actually share that video file with anyone, it just works with a normal video player, you don't need any special software, you don't need any special training or need to know how to use the analysis software. |
| 04:17 | The great thing about that is if you're working with a driver or anyone who's not either interested or able to use the logged data analysis for themselves, it's a video file that you can share with them and they're able to go through it in their own time after you've debriefed them to help them understand what they're doing, what they're doing compared to the faster driver or what they need to do better or point out things on track. |
| 04:37 | It's a really great training tool because again it just removes one of those barriers of having to use the analysis software for yourself. |
| 04:44 | So here on my laptop screen I've got one of those video files, I'm just going to play for you now. |
| 04:51 | So you can see we've got a couple of, the main display of the camera that's looking up the front is what the main part of the screen is. |
| 04:57 | We've got a picture in picture display here of the view that's facing back towards the driver. |
| 05:03 | We've got a little bit of lap time information here, so we've got the best lap time, the last lap time, which in this case was the last lap time. |
| 05:09 | And how far into the current lap they are. |
| 05:12 | We've got a G force plot here. |
| 05:15 | So we see we're in the middle of a long corner here so we're on the outer point of this little G force plot and as we move onto acceleration you will see the position of that dot move. |
| 05:25 | Then we've also got a speedo shown down here as well. |
| 05:27 | One of the great things about the video VBOX system is we've got the ability to overlay a track map on top of the video which is really helpful so you can see at the top here, we've got this little dot moving around the track and again that's just a really helpful tool to help give you some more context about where you are on track. |
| 05:46 | So now that I've shown you a little bit about that, let's get into the configuration of the Video VBOX itself. |
| 05:53 | Here on my laptop screen we've got the Video VBOX configuration tool. |
| 05:56 | So the idea behind this is this was where we do all the configuration for the scene that I showed in that video just before. |
| 06:03 | So this is where we've got a lot of control, a lot of flexibility over showing different elements on the screen or configuring everything in different ways but it's also where we configure all of the main parts of the logger as well and we'll go through that now and you'll see how all this works. |
| 06:17 | So when you bring up the software for itself, we've got all of the different context controls up here like you'd expect. |
| 06:24 | So when they talk about a scene in the Video VBOX, that's like the main layout that we've got on here. |
| 06:30 | So the idea is you can make a scene, you can save it, you can share it with somebody else, you can import it into your project. |
| 06:35 | You can modify that scene over time and save it as lots of different configuration names. |
| 06:40 | You can always go back and flick between them. |
| 06:42 | So that's what they mean by scene here. |
| 06:44 | So you can go through and create a new scene, you can import a scene, save it, export it, you can also download the scene from the Video VBOX that's currently in the VBOX itself. |
| 06:55 | So that means if you've got a scene that's currently stored within the logger itself and you don't have that scene stored on your computer somewhere, you can download that from the VBOX and then you can save it within the UI and modify it as you need to which is a really nice feature. |
| 07:09 | In the elements tab, this is what, when they say element they mean one of the displays. |
| 07:14 | So down here for example this speedo here is an element, this G Force plot is an element. |
| 07:20 | So the idea here is that there are a whole lot of pre defined elements that we'll actually go through in quite a lot of detail here and I'll show you guys the different elements you can choose from. |
| 07:28 | But if you wanted to get an element off someone else or save it or export it, this is where you'd have all of those controls. |
| 07:35 | You have got the ability to make your own custom elements and share them around in addition to all of the built in elements we've got here. |
| 07:45 | So in the video tab here we've got a couple of options, mainly around previewing what the Video VBOX sees at the moment which is really helpful when you first set it up. |
| 07:53 | So really the crux of the Video VBOX system is that we've got either one or multiple cameras that are well integrated with the data. |
| 08:01 | So one of the main things that we want to configure is make sure that those cameras are pointing in the right direction, make sure the orientation's correct, all of that stuff. |
| 08:08 | So this is one of the places we can do that. |
| 08:10 | So one of the options is here we've got, we can download the current output preview from the VBOX. |
| 08:16 | So what I'm going to do here, I've just got this USB cable here which is plugged into the front of the Video VBOX which is one of the ways you can interface with it. |
| 08:25 | I'm just going to plug this into my laptop. |
| 08:28 | And now I should have the option of downloading that scene, so you can see down the bottom here it's downloading that so you can see, this is exactly what the camera sees, you can see the view out the front of the car into our workshop here and you can see down the bottom left the shot of me which is actually partially obscured by a couple of lights we've got sitting here at the moment but normally like you saw in that preview before when I showed you the example output video, this is the view to be looking back at the driver, to give a little bit more context about what the driver is doing with their hands in particular throughout the corner. |
| 09:01 | So this is just really good, like I said, to set up the cameras initially and make sure everything's working properly. |
| 09:05 | You've also got the ability to preview in the background so it's the same thing, if I click preview and do the background, it'll just overlay it onto the canvas that we've got here. |
| 09:15 | Again it's really the same thing, it's just giving you a little bit of context around where all the different controls are going to sit from the current view that you've got in the car so we can also just cancel that as well. |
| 09:27 | So we've got a couple of options here around the language or couple of different languages you can switch between which is nice and also access to our help file as well, both help files for the software. |
| 09:40 | And also for the hardware itself so it's nice they put those links in there. |
| 09:43 | Definitely if you're using a VBOX system and you're going to configure it yourself, I definitely recommend looking through those help files just to get a little bit more familiar with all the different options you've got, it'll save you a little bit of time when it comes to setting everything up for yourself. |
| 09:58 | So that's it for the main context controls, we've also got controls here for uploading scenes via either USB or the SD card. |
| 10:07 | So that SD card is the same SD card that all of the logged data and the logged video will be stored on. |
| 10:13 | You've also got the option of connecting to it with a USB which is how I'm connected to the VBOX at the moment but it's nice to have those 2 options there. |
| 10:22 | So down the bottom of the UI here we've got these controls to set the zoom level, so just to give you a little bit more control, we'll go through in a lot more detail here but you'll see we can move all these elements around, gives us a lot of flexibility so having that zoom just gives you a little bit more control to get things set a bit more precisely. |
| 10:40 | We can show the grid on and off, again just helping us with that alignment. |
| 10:42 | We can change the spacing of the grid depending on what your preference is and we've also got some coordinates shown down the bottom here for each depending on the element that I've got selected, it's just got some coordinates and X and Y to help us position and size those on the screen that you might find useful as well. |
| 11:02 | So in the scene selection up the top here we've got these options with some pre defined scenes. |
| 11:10 | So these, you'll find when you buy one of these VBOXs it'll come defined with a whole lot of default scenes that you can load into your VBOX as a starting point. |
| 11:17 | It's really nice to have something else as a starting point and it's much easier to start with something and then modify it rather than build something from scratch. |
| 11:25 | There's nothing wrong with building it from scratch but I find most people tend to start with one of the suggested ones and modify it to their preference but you can do either. |
| 11:34 | So the idea here is that we can double click one of these and it's just asking me whether I'm fine with getting rid of the changes to the current one which I am because I've already got that one saved. |
| 11:45 | And you'll see it brings it up here. |
| 11:47 | So I can select any of these different ones, let's choose another one here, maybe a slightly more interesting one. |
| 11:55 | Wait for it to load, it's just got the progress bar down the bottom here. |
| 11:58 | And so now we've got the freedom to drag any of these elements around, move them, modify them so you can see it's super intuitive to go through and build your own scene in one of these things. |
| 12:11 | You've also obviously got the option to, once you've defined a scene of your choice you can save it, you can rename, you can make copies of them, you can make, whether you've got scenes set for, different scenes for different tracks you go to or whether you've got different scenes saved on your laptop because you're swapping the VBOX between different cars or however you're managing that, it is a pretty straightforward process for managing the different scenes. |
| 12:33 | The next control I want to go through here is the elements themselves. |
| 12:37 | So the elements like I said before are the different displays that we've got set up on the screen that we can drag around to our preference. |
| 12:43 | So each one of these parts on the screen here that I'm clicking on is an element so this is just an image element, this is the second camera, the picture in picture element, track map element and we've got some data displays down here coming out of the VBOX itself which are all defined as elements. |
| 13:00 | So what I might do to start with here, I'm just going to delete that one and I'm just going to start adding some different elements and I'll go through how each one is defined and look at some of the options we've got for each one of the elements that we've got on screen. |
| 13:13 | So you can see we've got in the element type drop down we've got, these are the different categories of elements that we can choose from. |
| 13:20 | So the first one, I'll start from the top, is the auto track map. |
| 13:23 | So if we click new there, so it actually shows up as a blank box for us because the idea behind the auto track map is it's that track map display that we had shown in the preview that I showed you guys earlier on. |
| 13:36 | The idea behind that is it becomes flexible regardless of which track you're at. |
| 13:40 | What I mean by that is because we've got GPS coordinates, so we've got a way to measure the GPS position already plumbed into the VBOX because the whole system is based on GPS. |
| 13:52 | This means that regardless of where you are in the world or which track you're at, because there's a whole database of tracks, it's a massive database, which I'll go through a little bit later. |
| 14:02 | The idea here is that the VBOX automatically detects which track you're at and it will bring up the correct track map for where you are. |
| 14:10 | So this can be a really nice feature in that you can leave one scene selected or have one scene selected or saved to your VBOX and if you're going to a whole lot of different tracks, maybe you're part of a local race series where you're moving around a few different circuits, means you don't need to change that scene, sorry the track map will automatically update for you which is a really nice feature I think. |
| 14:32 | So we can drag that to wherever we want on the screen. |
| 14:36 | And that's essentially all you need to do as far as worrying about where you are on the track. |
| 14:43 | You've got this option here, you have got the option of changing the image it uses for showing your position on the track so in this case by default it's a red dot, I don't feel like I need to change that so I'll leave that by default. |
| 14:54 | In general you have got the option to go through and load different images on for various different elements that you've got control over. |
| 15:05 | So let's go down to the next one, so we've got, the next one is display range. |
| 15:09 | So the display range, by default it's setup as a gear position indicator, so there are a whole lot of different ways we can show the different gear positions. |
| 15:19 | Essentially the way this works is we're going to map one of the outputs that the VBOX might have access to and it's going to update that position. |
| 15:26 | That's going to be much clearer as I go through and show you how this thing's configured so we've got, because we've got this control selected, that means it's active so that means the context control here for the properties down the bottom right here are going to be only relevant to that element. |
| 15:40 | So we've got some options to configure the background. |
| 15:45 | The font and also the range. |
| 15:49 | So the parameter, what that parameter means is which parameter is going to control the output of this element. |
| 15:57 | So in this particular situation, we've got this element defined as a gear position. |
| 16:02 | So obviously if we've got the ability for the logger to know gear position, this is what we've mapped to it. |
| 16:09 | Now the way you would do it is potentially you could be getting this from the CAN bus. |
| 16:13 | Now I don't have, as I said before the CAN bus isn't connected to this logger. |
| 16:17 | The only data that this logger is getting is anything that's coming from GPS and also from the camera outputs as well. |
| 16:27 | But if we did have this logger connected to the CAN bus, you could have that information coming in from the CAN bus and you would be able to map that to a gear position output. |
| 16:40 | So that's where you would select that, you would select probably from the CAN bus here and then there would be an option to select from the different, from the gear position that you would have configured on the CAN bus there. |
| 16:49 | Now obviously you've got a font control which is common to all of them. |
| 16:53 | So it doesn't really relate to this display but you've got this font, anything that's got text, any element that's got text on it, this is where you can come and modify that here. |
| 17:02 | But really this is the meat of the properties down here for this particular control. |
| 17:06 | Where you've got each one of these ranges, so you can say if the value, so in our case, if the gear position value was between 0 and 1, show this image and you can see the preview that's shown here. |
| 17:18 | Then you've got another one here, if the element has got a value between 1.1 and 2, show this image. |
| 17:23 | So I think you get the idea, as each of these values increments up, you can see how the image changes position. |
| 17:31 | Now you've got obviously lots of different ways you can configure that, you can see how you can, got the option to load a new image here depending on what image you want to map to which output. |
| 17:43 | So that's the idea behind that element there, we'll get rid of that one there. |
| 17:47 | Now the next element we want to look at is the double bar graph. |
| 17:51 | So this is where you've got a whole lot of predefined ones. |
| 17:54 | For example if we've got our, quite often this double bar graph will be used for a G Force plot. |
| 18:00 | What I mean by that is a way for us to visualise a longitudinal and the lateral G force on the video output. |
| 18:08 | So this is already pre configured for us, again we've got the options here to configure the background which is just essentially that image that's sitting there behind the element. |
| 18:17 | Then we've got the values of the horizontal bar graph itself. |
| 18:20 | So we've got, we can set the maximum and minimum ranges here and we've also got the. |
| 18:25 | sorry this is just for the horizontal part and then we'll go through the vertical part separately. |
| 18:32 | Then we've also got the ability to put in a test value which is really nice. |
| 18:34 | A lot of these elements have the ability to put in a test value. |
| 18:38 | So you can visualise in real time what that's going to look like when you go through and run that on the car, So if, let's say if we put in a value of one here, you can see that this value on the bar graph jumps up to 1 for us, if we put it at 0.5 you can see it sits down there so it's just a nice way to get a bit of a preview on what that's going to look like. |
| 18:56 | Again we've got the option to map there which parameter we want to match to this output so by default it's mapped under the GPS section, under lateral acceleration but you can see all of the different things we can map that to. |
| 19:08 | Obviously for us, for using this style of display it makes sense to map these to the lateral and longitudinal acceleration we've got the vertical one which is obviously mapped to the longitudinal acceleration as well. |
| 19:22 | So that's it for the bar graph, obviously you've got a lot of flexibility as far as configuring that however you want. |
| 19:29 | You can configure it to whatever output you want, you don't need to do that just to lateral and longitudinal acceleration. |
| 19:34 | We've also got the gauge here, so the gauge is a really common display that you'll often be using for things like RPM or speed, however you want to use it. |
| 19:41 | So let's just choose a nice simple looking one here, this I think it actually based on the one we use in the actual RaceCraft example. |
| 19:50 | So again we've got the option to change the background but more importantly for the gauge display we've got the ability to modify the way this gauge behaves. |
| 20:02 | So we've got this slider here which is a manual control around the position of the needle. |
| 20:09 | And we've got these buttons here to set the minimum and maximum of the range. |
| 20:13 | So if you want to, obviously depending on, you've got a background image which is just essentially a dumb image, it doesn't know anything about positions or needles or data or anything, it's just an overlaid image and we want to be able to map the needle position to relevant parts of that image. |
| 20:29 | So the idea here is, if let's say this was our 0 position we wanted to set, we could set the minimum positiion there. |
| 20:36 | And we could set the maximum position we'd obviously want that to be at some sensible position if we wanted the maximum to be there, we could set the maximum and now our total range is defined between those 2 travels. |
| 20:47 | Obviously we want, let's reset it back to its original position, we'll remap that 0 position here to something sensible. |
| 20:55 | So it works as we expect it to. |
| 20:59 | Maybe a little bit more just to get that right, there we go. |
| 21:02 | And set the maximum. |
| 21:04 | Now we've got the option to move this needle clockwise or anti clockwise here. |
| 21:08 | And we can also define the number of rotations, the number of times, the number of total times the needle can go around the clock. |
| 21:15 | So we've got the range here which we've got defined by default as between 0 and 320 which makes sense because these are the values that are shown in that background there, we've got between 0 and 320. |
| 21:25 | And again we've got that test value so if we want to put let's say a value of 200 in there. |
| 21:31 | And it'll show up on the gauge just to essentially give us a preview just to make sure we've got it set all correctly as well. |
| 21:37 | As with most of the elements we've got the option to map it to a parameter so by default here we've got it mapped to GPS speed. |
| 21:44 | And we've got, by default it's actually mapped in miles per hour, obviously we want to show that in km/h because that is the value that's shown here on the gauge so that means that the output value that's coming from the GPS data is going to be mapped correctly to that gauge. |
| 22:03 | So that's it for the gauges themselves. |
| 22:07 | Just going to delete that from our screen. |
| 22:11 | Make room for another one. |
| 22:15 | So we've got the image next and this is really just, you can think of it as again it's sort of a dumb overlay, it's something that's used to annotate something on our display. |
| 22:24 | We've got a couple of pre defined ones here so we'll see later when we add some of the text parameters in the live updating values from the data, these ones here are just simple pictures that are just essentially used to annotate what we've got. |
| 22:38 | So you can change the size of these, you don't have to use a dumb image here to display the values, you can also add fixed text parameters which we'll go through soon. |
| 22:52 | But there's just some pre defined ones here, you've also got the ability to upload obviously your own images, this is particularly useful if you want to do something like uploading your own logo, either your race team or your company logo. |
| 23:02 | So we've got some of the default Racelogic ones here. |
| 23:07 | You can see how you can move them around your screen and place them as you like which can be a nice feature for some people if you want to personalise the way your Video VBOX output looks. |
| 23:19 | So we've got the picture in picture display here so that's actually what we've got shown down here by default. |
| 23:23 | So if we want to add, if we've got 2 cameras hooked up as we do in this system, so we've got our main camera looking at the front and you've got that second camera, which you've got the option to point at whatever you want, you could point it at the driver, you could point it at the driver's feet, you can point it anywhere in the cabin or even out the back, it depends what's relevant for you, for however you want to use that but depending on how you've got your cameras configured and what the display looks like, will depend on where you want to put that picture in picture display so we've got it put down the bottom here which just isn't getting in the way of what we want to see out the front of the car itself. |
| 23:56 | We've got simple shapes which again, it's really just a way to, we've got some pre defined ones here which we can go through and essentially just create, background areas and everything on our displays, you've got the option to modify the colour depending on what you want to use it for, obviously pretty flexible. |
| 24:11 | We've got the option to change the display, the display transparency as well as the shape so there's all sorts of things you can use this for depending on how you want to make use those shapes, whether you want them to be transparent or not. |
| 24:24 | Just a nice way to be able to again annotate and add more detail to your display. |
| 24:28 | We've got the single bar graph which as I'm sure you are aware, that is the simpler version of the double bar graph that we looked at before. |
| 24:38 | So this is something you might be using for something like brake pressure or throttle position if you've got that data going into your VBOX. |
| 24:44 | Again we've got all the normal outputs that you would come to expect that we've been through already. |
| 24:49 | So we can change the colour of the bar graph, by default we've set that as red, I'm happy to leave that there. |
| 24:53 | We've got the range. |
| 24:55 | So let's say we've got, we're using this for brake pressure and for argument's sake we've got 1000 psi as the maximum value. |
| 25:03 | From 0 to 1000 so that's going to show the intensity of the brake pressure that the driver is using and let's say we want to put a value in here of 300, so for 300 psi that's how 300 psi will show up on that gauge. |
| 25:16 | Now again we've got the ability to map this to whatever value we want. |
| 25:20 | One of the really nice things that you can do is use this to show the predictive lap time values which I think is actually a really nice way to do this so in this particular car, in addition to the Video VBOX we've also got another Raceclogic product which is what they call the OLED display. |
| 25:38 | Which is just a way to show the gain/loss time that's coming out of the VBOX in real time to the driver on a screen. |
| 25:45 | So that's just a little screen that we've got sitting here in front of me which shows the gain/loss relative to the reference lap if you've got that stored in the VBOX itself. |
| 25:54 | So down here on the screen I've got the ability to map that either to the reference lap time or the delta T. |
| 26:00 | So the advantage of doing it to the delta time is I can use that bar graph to give a visual overlay of what the lap time's looking like relative to the delta so that could be a nice implementation of using something like a bar graph. |
| 26:13 | You could even use two of these side by side if you want to get really fancy and have different colours. |
| 26:17 | You could have green on one side for positive values and a separate one for negative values so you'd have a green to red transition, you could put 2 of these next to each other and configure them. |
| 26:28 | So that they show only positive values on one side and only negative on the other. |
| 26:32 | It's really flexible, you can see how you could use it for almost anything you can think of. |
| 26:35 | So now we get into our labels so we've got some default ones set up here. |
| 26:42 | So we've got best lap time here, we can go through and modiy that text, we can show that to anything we want. |
| 26:49 | So let's say we wanted to show something like that delta time value which is going to the same delta time value we've got shown live to the driver. |
| 26:55 | It's something we can visualise on the video after the fact as well so let's just change this to delta T. |
| 27:07 | And we'll make use of that in a second. |
| 27:09 | We'll drag that down here, you can have as many of these as you like, you can stack them up in any way that suits you. |
| 27:15 | Now let's go to our next display type which will be a text parameter. |
| 27:20 | So where the text label is just a fixed piece of text that doesn't update, it's just almost like an image, it doesn't have any interaction, the text parameter is something that can be mapped to real data that's coming out of the car. |
| 27:33 | So here I've got my text parameter that I'm just going to drag down here. |
| 27:36 | It's relatively heavily configurable. |
| 27:39 | Now I'm going to map that to the delta time variable that we went through before. |
| 27:44 | So that's coming out of our predictive lap timing part. |
| 27:48 | And we're going to map that to the delta T value. |
| 27:53 | Now we've got some options around the format. |
| 27:57 | So I've got the number of integer places, so that's the number of leading zeros or the number of integers before the decimal point that we've got showing. |
| 28:06 | Hopefully this value is going to be always less than 10 seconds. |
| 28:13 | We don't want that, if it gets anything close to 10 seconds on the average racetrack, that's going to mean we've got an enormous amount of work to do with our driver, most of the time you're only going to need 1 integer value shown there, the number of decimal places, we certainly don't need 5, 3 will be fine to show that plus or minus. |
| 28:30 | We've also got some options around padding for leading zeros and where we want to align the text and of course the font control as well if we wanted to change but I'm going to leave that by default. |
| 28:39 | So that means that delta T value is now going to update if we would load that to the VBOX to show us how far away from the reference lap we are at each point on track. |
| 28:50 | The last couple here, we've got the track map so at the start I went through the auto track map which as I said is going to automatically update based on the GPS position depending on where you are in the world or which track you're at. |
| 29:02 | You've also got the option to put in a manual track map. |
| 29:05 | So this could be an option if you've got a track that's not part of the database which is pretty unlikely. |
| 29:10 | There's an enormous number of countries and tracks covered that come preloaded with the Video VBOX. |
| 29:14 | You have got the option to be able to define your own track maps as well. |
| 29:17 | And if you wanted to upload that, maybe for whatever reason that that's not part of the database, this may be a place where you may want to come and manually define that as well. |
| 29:27 | So you've got the option to upload any user defined ones here as well. |
| 29:30 | If we go through and select, let's go and find our local track here in New Zealand. |
| 29:38 | One of our local tracks. |
| 29:40 | So you can see here that if we wanted to set the Highlands Motorsport Park full track map here we could come and manually set that as well. |
| 29:47 | Now one of the nice things, the reasons you might want to do this, if you go back to our initial preview I showed before, so you can see in the top right here the track map itself, there's lots of different configurations available at this particular racetrack. |
| 30:01 | You can see it's maybe a little bit messy to look at. |
| 30:04 | If you're not used to the initial, the way that the track looks, you might want to lock yourself down into using one of the specific configurations. |
| 30:13 | So this is one nice feature here, we've got the ability to look at only one of the track layouts. |
| 30:20 | If we just wanted to look at the full track which is the track that we were using on that particular, the data we're going to look at today we were only using the full track map. |
| 30:29 | My personal opinion as I said is to stay using the auto track map. |
| 30:32 | I find that that does the job for me and it means it's one less job for me to go through and update each time I go to a new circuit. |
| 30:40 | And the very last one that we've got to look at here is the XY plot. |
| 30:43 | So this is something that we've already got shown down here in the bottom. |
| 30:48 | You've got the option of choosing from any of these, of course you can upload your own design if you want to but there's some pre defined track maps here. |
| 30:56 | But if we go through some of the background options, again like you'd expect, it's similar to that double bar graph layout. |
| 31:04 | We've got the option to map it to any of the outputs or any of the data that the VBOX has got access to. |
| 31:11 | So in this case we've obviously got the X axis, the horizontal axis mapped to lateral acceleration and the Y axis, the vertical axis mapped to longitudinal acceleration. |
| 31:19 | Now that we've gone through and set up the scene, as in the way everything is going to look when all the data is recorded on top of the video feed, now we can go through and set up the rest of the main configuration of the logger itself. |
| 31:32 | So over here on my laptop screen, we've got basic stuff as we move down. |
| 31:39 | So you can set the position or the timezone of where you are. |
| 31:43 | So that's obviously based on your position on earth, that's coming from the GPS data. |
| 31:48 | So that's a really helpful tool in that it means every log file can be appended with the time and the date which is just really nice for a little bit more context. |
| 31:56 | If you're looking through your log files and you want to know when each one was recorded, it's just a nice little prompt there for you to understand which time of the day. |
| 32:06 | Often you'll know, I did this next, you'll be looking back at data after the fact and you'll be saying look I know this was the second to last run of the day or we did that one just after lunch, having that timestamp and date there is just a really nice piece of context. |
| 32:19 | So I suggest setting up the system info such that we have the timezone that suits you for wherever you are in the world. |
| 32:27 | You've also got some options on the smoothing settings, so what I mean by smoothing settings is we've got speed, lateral, longitudinal acceleration and radius so all of the data that's coming out of the VBOX is coming out based on the GPS data. |
| 32:41 | So it doesn't have an onboard accelerometer for example. |
| 32:46 | A lot of loggers will either have an onboard G sensor or they will have an output they can take from, to take an external G sensor and log that. |
| 32:55 | Now the VBOX does have the ability to take an outboard, sorry does have the ability to take an external accelerometer and use that as an input and log that data but by default, it does all of the acceleration calculations based off the GPS signal. |
| 33:13 | Which while it's not super super accurate, it's absolutely still plenty of data that you can use to make, you can really understand what's going on with the car based off that acceleration data. |
| 33:25 | If you're doing really intense calculations or you're really getting really detailed, it's probably not going to be sufficient but certainly from a driver training perspective, having this inferred G force data based off the GPS position is absolutely still plenty enough for what we need. |
| 33:43 | The smooth settings themselves, what we mean by that is essentially getting rid of some of the quick changes in the output. |
| 33:50 | Essentially it's a moving average filter that's just being applied to the data that's been gathered, the raw data from the GPS and depending on where you are in the world and what sort of satellite coverage and stuff like that, what particular place you are, you might need to have to tune those smoothing settings that moving average filter just to get things looking exactly how you want. |
| 34:11 | Now by default I find the default settings are totally fine so I'm not going to change anything for our situation, there's no need to update those anymore. |
| 34:21 | So we've got some options here in the GPS settings. |
| 34:24 | So there's different types of GPS sensors you can physically fit to the car. |
| 34:28 | That's one of the, that's the only external sensor that we've actually got fitted to this. |
| 34:33 | That means there's a place in the back of the VBOX to plug that GPS sensor directly in and we've just got to mount it on top of the roof. |
| 34:41 | Goes through the roof skin which is the best place to have it because it gives you the best satellite coverage. |
| 34:46 | So here you've just got the option of selecting which of the two sensors you've got fitted to the car, we've got the default 10 Hz sensor and there's no more options to go along with that one there. |
| 34:58 | But that's essentially where you just configure that sensor. |
| 35:00 | So we have got, in the serial applications we've got this OLED display so that's what I wast talking about a little bit earlier. |
| 35:06 | That's the display we're using to give the driver feedback on how they're doing relative to the reference time while we're actually on track. |
| 35:12 | So there's a serial port on the back of the VBOX and there's different options that you've got for plugging different components into there. |
| 35:20 | You've got a couple of different VBOX, a couple of the different VBOX products that can be pre configured to plug into this thing but essentially you just plugin whatever component you're using for the serial connection and then you select it on here and the configuration's done, it's already ready to go. |
| 35:35 | We've got in the log settings, so this is where we have got some control over the way the log files are named and also more importantly than that even is when the logging starts and finishes. |
| 35:47 | So in the top here we've got how the file name is going to be logged. |
| 35:53 | So if you want to preface that with any, if you want to preface the log file to be written with anything in particular, by default it's VBOX. |
| 36:03 | Then you've got the option to use the time in the file name so that's what I was talking about before having the timestamp, the option to use the timestamp is there which I always leave set up like that because again, just gives me a little bit more context about where that log file came from and when it was recorded. |
| 36:17 | Then we've also got some options about where the, how the data is stored and by default, almost always with the VBOX be using the SD card option. |
| 36:28 | Then we've got the logging mode, so we've got the option to disable logging here if you needed to for any reason. |
| 36:34 | Then you've got the conditions by which the logger will start recording which is really important to make sure you've got this configured. |
| 36:41 | If this part isn't configured properly, it may mean that you get no data recorded at all because it will be, the logger may never start recording because you haven't told it to or you could, at the other end of the spectrum it could be recording everything, you've also got the option to have it so as soon as the ignition's on or as soon as the power, the unit's powered on, that'll be recording, that's fine in some situations but the problem with it is it usually just generates an enormous amount of data that just becomes most of it being useless and that means you've got to wade through a lot more stuff, your files get bigger, means that the data management's a little bit more challenging so I would tend to, for circuit racing anyway, I would encourage people to set up an automatic logging condition like that to get around some of those problems. |
| 37:20 | So there's a couple of different modes we've got here. |
| 37:22 | So we've got the only when moving, so that's going to mean that only when the car is moving is when the log file is going to be stopped and started which is usually a pretty sensible place to start. |
| 37:31 | You've got continuous, manual or CAN based. |
| 37:34 | So continuous is obviously all the time, manual is, you've got the option to have an external button, there's a place to plug in an external button on the back side of the VBOX so you can have it so you can manually turn it on and off. |
| 37:47 | That's not something I'd normally recommend because it's very easy to forget to turn it on but in some situations I'm sure it's appropriate to be able to have manual control over the logging. |
| 37:55 | And also you've got the option to trigger it over CAN if you wanted to as well. |
| 38:00 | So because we're selecting the only when moving, we've got a threshold here to set for the minimum speed so this means in this case there's a default value so as soon as the car is travelling over 2.5 km/h, the logger will start recording. |
| 38:13 | And then we've got our stop log delay. |
| 38:17 | So that just means that the car will need to be stopped for 3 seconds before the log file will be stopped. |
| 38:22 | So it'll depend on your application, how you want to set that, for example if the car was coming in and doing a pitstop and you wanted to record the entire race as one log file, maybe you'd want to extend that time past your pitstop value. |
| 38:36 | At the other end of the spectrum, if it's, if you want the stints to be broken up individually, then assuming your pitstop was going to take longer than 3 seconds which I would suggest most people it will, then that means that the logger will automatically stop that log file and when the car starts moving again, over 2.5 km/h it will start recording again. |
| 38:56 | So depending on the situation you want to use, will depend on the settings you want to use there. |
| 39:01 | In the video settings we've got some options around the video format. |
| 39:05 | So you'll want to set that to, depending on which camera setup you're using you'll want to use the recommended values for that and you've got the option here to choose between low, medium and high quality. |
| 39:16 | The reason that's important is because obviously using high quality is going to make the files larger, it's going to make them a bit nicer to look at but depending on your situation if you're recording really long log files you may want to record, reduce the size of the log files, just makes again the data management a little bit easier. |
| 39:36 | Being video it ends up making really large files quite quickly so it's typically, particularly if you're doing something like endurance racing you may end up needing to reduce the quality to have enough room on your SD card to get the whole race. |
| 39:49 | Or at the other end of the spectrum, maybe it's just about saving room on your computer because if you're saving everything locally on your computer, if you've got a lot of data, and video stored in your computer, even on modern computers with relatively large solid state drives it does end up filling up the computers quite quickly as well. |
| 40:05 | So that's just what, you've got the quality options there for. |
| 40:09 | Now you've got audio settings as wel. |
| 40:11 | That's another input that the video VBOX has with it, it's got a little microphone that plugs into the back of it. |
| 40:16 | It's not something I'd say is essential but it can be a nice piece of data to have again just to give you a little bit more context about what's going on inside the car at the time, whether that's about hearing noises in the car or understanding when the throttle's being picked up or whatever it is, it's just another nice feature to have the option there to record the audio so you've got the option to do a mono or a stereo or a mixed option and some options around the sensitivity there as well. |
| 40:42 | We've got some camera settings so by default we're going to use picture in picture, you've got also got the option to go with 2 cameras or 4 camera quadrant or anything like that, you can see how that changes up in the display up here. |
| 40:54 | Picture in picture is something most people will be using with the Video VBOX as far as you've got 1 primary display which is the one that the, is in line with what the driver sees out the windscreen and then you'l have your picture in picture is your secondary display which isn't usually as important to see all of the detail but you might want to get a perspective on what the driver's doing with the steering wheel or what they're doing with their body or anything like that, that's where you usually have the picture in picture mode set so that second display was just a much smaller view that's taking up less of the screen. |
| 41:23 | Now we've got some options around the lap timing. |
| 41:28 | So this is definitely a really critical part of getting your logging set up right. |
| 41:32 | As I said, as far as the lap timing, obviously you're looking for the start/finish line to trigger the start and end of each lap. |
| 41:41 | So if this part isn't set up properly, you're not going to record any lap times which is obviously a pretty big problem. |
| 41:46 | The lap time is our main metric for understanding our performance so we want to make sure that this is absolutely set and set properly. |
| 41:54 | So you've got some options here to ignore a certain number of start or finish line counts depending on your situation. |
| 42:02 | If you wanted to ignore out laps or whatever you could set that here. |
| 42:05 | Now here is where you set the position of the start/finish line and also of the gate width. |
| 42:10 | So we went through in the course talking about what the coordinates of the start/finish line mean and also that gate width just to make sure that the, you've got that one point in space that's selected as the centre of the start/finish line and then we're selecting a gate width which is essentially a detection zone that you're defining where if the car is anywhere within that gate, it just gives you a little bit more variability on the GPS accuracy and also your lateral position on the start/finish line, it'll make sure that you trigger that lap beacon which is what we want to make sure we can do. |
| 42:43 | So we've got the option of loading, so we can either manually input the coordinates of the start/finish line if you want to so again we went through in the course an example of using a GPS app on your phone where you can get those start/finish line coordinates if you don't have them already. |
| 42:57 | Often you can also get them from Google Maps. |
| 43:00 | But by default, there's a whole lot of start/finish lines already defined for you in the software so you can see there's an enormous amount of countries and tracks already defined in here, chances are if you're doing for most racing that you're doing, you're going to have the option of selecting from a drop down here and you're not going to have to do anything out of the ordinary which is a really nice feature just to save you a little bit of time here so that's where you go and select the start/finish line. |
| 43:23 | So if you have got any external connection to a CAN bus, this is where you can connect it here. |
| 43:27 | So we don't have a CAN bus connected to this car. |
| 43:33 | To this logger sorry but we have got the ability to go through and define everything here as far as the baud rate, different options depending on what sort of CAN device you're actually connecting into. |
| 43:45 | There's an option here that we're not making use of which is the performance tests which is something if you're interested in doing 0-100 tests or 100-0 tests or anything you see down here whether you're doing 1/4 mile or 1/8th mile it can go ahead and automatically do those tests for you, it's got the option to give you beeps at the end of each test, an audible beep that the driver can hear so that you know the test has been completed. |
| 44:06 | So that's not something that we're going to make any use of for us because we're only really interested in doing lap timing and doing circuit racing analysis. |
| 44:14 | So the last one here is the math channels. |
| 44:16 | So this is quite a nice feature, any channel that the VBOX has access to, you've got the ability to manipulate by doing some math channels. |
| 44:24 | Like we went through a little bit in the course but what I'm going to do here is just go and edit the default one that we've got here just to show you guys exactly what that looks like. |
| 44:32 | So here are the sources of data that we've got access to so by default we've got all of these GPS things. |
| 44:40 | Often you'll be doing things with speed, lateral and longitudinal acceleration, whatever it is, you've got all of these parameters that we can click on and you can see they've got this little alias here for G0, G1, G2, G3, these are what's referenced here in the actual definition of the equation. |
| 44:52 | So at the top we've got the name that you want to call the math channel. |
| 44:56 | Then we've got the equation itself so in this particular channel, this is a combo G which just means the total combined G force which is the way that's normally defined is what we call the square root of the sum of the squares and all that's doing is taking the square of the lateral plus the square of the longitudinal then taking the square root of that addition and that gives us an equivalent total G force so that's what's defined here, we've got the square root, SQRT which is the syntax they use for square root, then we've got opening and closing brackets around the entire expression and then we've got, to square these terms we've just got them multiplying them by themselves so G10 times G10, so we'd come down here, look at G10, that's lateral acceleration times lateral acceleration which is giving us lateral acceleration squared. |
| 45:42 | And then we've got G9 times G9, we'll come and look at G9, that's longitudinal so G9 times G9 is giving us the longitudinal acceleration squared and then we're taking the square root of that entire sum. |
| 45:53 | Then we've also got the options to specify the output units and everything that we want that output to look at. |
| 46:02 | So in this term, in this particular situation it's going to give us units of, by default it's actually giving us units of km/h which is not what we want, we want to define this, sorry it is correct already, it's giving us, it's using these values and it's going to give us the output of G which is what we want the output of the combo G to be. |
| 46:23 | So if we go through we see we haven't got any of these other things, we haven't got anything hooked to the CAN bus, no drift box, no mini input module which is another way of inputting raw data, raw analog data into the VBOX itself. |
| 46:38 | We haven't got any of these but you can see we've got access to any of these if we want to use any of those in math channels. |
| 46:49 | Let me just get rid of that. |
| 46:53 | So the last step, now that we've gone through all of that configuration process fro the VBOX is to actually send the configuration to the VBOX itself. |
| 47:00 | So it's a really simple process, I've still got the logger connected to, still got the logger connected to the computer here, so all I need to do is go through and press upload, it'll ask me down the bottom here, bit of a warning, it says this scene that's currently on the logger will be overwritten if you want to do this, so yes, no problem, I want to do that and you'll see down the bottom here it's saving everything that we've got there and it's actually sending it to the logger for us right now. |
| 47:26 | So now that means once that's uploaded that means that's the scene that we've got set in the logger and we're ready to go now. |
| 47:35 | The next step is to set up our storage for the logger. |
| 47:38 | We want to make sure that there is adequate space in the logger and we also want to make sure that there's no old data there that we're going to go through and make it kind of confusing when we go to download the logger if we've got old data in there from previous session, it's just going to make it a little bit more confusing as far as understanding which data is from which session. |
| 47:55 | So I always go through and clear the storage medium before I head to the track. |
| 47:59 | So in this particular logger as I said before we've got an SD card that everything's stored on. |
| 48:03 | Often other loggers it's stored on a solid state style memory. |
| 48:07 | Regardless of the storage type I always go through and make sure it's cleared. |
| 48:11 | So in this case it's just as simple as putting the SD card in the computer and clearing everything that's stored on it in the same way that you would with any other generic SD card, whether it was from the camera or whatever. |
| 48:23 | Obviously you want to make sure that you've taken everything that you want off that, any useful data, you want to make sure it's stored in your computer before you go ahead and delete that. |
| 48:31 | Now at this point we've go the whole system set up and configured and we can be pretty confident that we're going to head to the track now and we're going to gather the data that we need reliably. |
