Professional Motorsport Data Analysis: Step 1: Initial Configuration
Watch This Course
$197 USD
-OR-
Or
8 easy payments of only $24.63
Instant access. Easy checkout. No fees.
Learn more
Step 1: Initial Configuration
32.59
| 00:00 | - Step 1 is always to go ahead and configure the logger properly. |
| 00:04 | Now I don't actually have the car physically with me but I do have the configuration file and if we jump over here to my laptop screen, I'll show you guys a little but about what this product actually is. |
| 00:13 | So I'm here on the AiM website and you can see this is a combined dash logger product. |
| 00:18 | So we've got the main body of the logger is also a dashboard for the driver so it's all about just combining lots of functionality all into one unit. |
| 00:28 | You can see this is pretty much how it's mounted in the car. |
| 00:31 | This isn't the particular car that we're using today but this is a TCR car, it's actually from a different brand, this one is a Seat but it's very similar in the way it's laid out. |
| 00:41 | Now it is really heavily configurable as far as the dashboard display goes. |
| 00:45 | We will go through some different examples of exactly how we can lay out the different screen layouts. |
| 00:53 | I'll just come down a little bit further. |
| 00:55 | You can see on the back of the dashboard here, there are a couple of Autosport connectors. |
| 00:58 | This is all about getting the data into the dash and also any logic you're using the dash for, so it does have the ability as well to be able to switch on and off different devices depending how you want to use that logic but we'll see more of that. |
| 01:13 | It does have the option to configure an external camera so you can use this thing potentially as a rear view camera if you wanted to as well. |
| 01:20 | It's got an integrated shift light which we'll go through the setup of soon. |
| 01:24 | Obviously that's a pretty standard feature in any dash loggers but it just gives you the ability to tune up your shift points. |
| 01:32 | We've got a whole lot of different modules we can plug into this thing as well which we'll see, there's some options for in the configuration section. |
| 01:39 | We've got the external GPS here, we have two options for expanding channels here so there's a generic one at the top which is a general purpose analog inputs and then the one at the bottom here is for thermocouples only. |
| 01:56 | So just allowing you to put in really almost any sensor you'd like, any analog sensor or temperature sensor and the idea here is that that connects to the CAN bus so you can keep stacking those things up and keep adding functionality to it. |
| 02:08 | There's lambda control unit options which we'll see in the configurations as well. |
| 02:12 | We also have the option to control and interface with AiM's SmartCam system which is simply their standard video capture system as well and there's also an additional memory module if you want to expand that as well. |
| 02:25 | There's a nice layout here which shows potentially how you could connect up all these different things to the dash. |
| 02:31 | So you can see here we've got a range of analog inputs and speed inputs that you can put in here. |
| 02:36 | We can obviously put our lap trigger in here. |
| 02:38 | Now in particular this is going to be used if you're using a lap beacon. |
| 02:42 | The example today is actually using a GPS lap beacon which is what a lot of people will be making use of just for convenience. |
| 02:50 | Obviously we've got a camera there, we've got the lambda controller we went through, the GPS and you can also see all of the different expansion modules as well. |
| 02:58 | Now one of the things that's really nice, well that I find really nice about the AiM system is you do have the ability to connect up to the logger with WiFi, so that's both for downloading the data and also for modifying and uploading different configurations. |
| 03:11 | I find it just a nice handy tool. |
| 03:14 | The vast majority of the time when you're at the racetrack, you're going to be using a laptop when you're going ahead and making any changes to the configuration of the dash or logger. |
| 03:22 | And just not having to carry around a download cable with you, sometimes their bespoke download cables for some brands of logger, often they're just a normal ethernet or a network cable. |
| 03:34 | In this particular case this means we can connect to the logger just by connecting to its local WiFi network which I do find really handy, it means I don't even need to go over to the car, as long as I'm in some sort of close proximity to the car, if the car's in the garage, all I need to do is select the logger from wherever I'm sitting in the garage, I don't even need to go jump in the car which I think is actually a really nice feature and I'm sure it's something we'll see built into more and more dashes as time goes on as well. |
| 03:58 | You can also see down there, just before I go any further, it's got the ability obviously to connect up to the ECU to receive any information over the CAN bus in particular and it's also got the ability to communicate over a second CAN bus, second totally separate CAN bus if required. |
| 04:14 | Now we have got the, we've got a little bit of an outline here of the software we're going to be using to configure it today which is Race Studio 3 which is AiM's default configuration software they use for all of their different loggers, so whether you're using an AiM Solo or whether you're using something a little bit more higher end like this which is combined dash logger, it's the same tool which is nice, I find a lot of the other brands of data loggers, there's a separate configuration tool that you need to use per product which is fine if you're only using one of those products but if you're anything like me and you're probably involved in lots of different cars, it means you do need to have the right tool for the right logger but I find it nice like this that I just have to have one piece of AiM software and I can connect to all the different AiM products so I think that is quite a nice little feature. |
| 05:03 | A little bit of a screenshot here showing the analysis software which is what we'll be going through soon which is Race Studio 2 from AiM which is their currently released main software that you use for interfacing with, so for looking at the data and understanding, actually visualising it for yourself. |
| 05:22 | And that's about it for all I wanted to go through there but I just wanted to give you guys a little bit of a bird's eye view of the product considering I don't actually have it physically with me here in the studio. |
| 05:32 | Obviously if you're setting this thing up for the first time, the first step is going ahead and physically mounting it to the car and also wiring it up so that's going to be things like the power and the ground connections for the logger, it's going to be connecting up any external sensors or any other information it needs. |
| 05:48 | So whether that's analog sensors that are coming from say damper potentiometers, if it's connecting up to the CAN bus, so you can get ECU data in there and any other data that's available on your CAN bus, those are the steps we need to go through which is stuff that we went through in detail inside the course body itself. |
| 06:05 | This particular car comes factory fitted with this dash logger, so there's not actual configuration for us to do with this particular example. |
| 06:13 | Let's jump across to my laptop screen where I've got Race Studio 3 open and we can jump right into the configuration of this dashboard. |
| 06:20 | So over here on my laptop screen I've got AiM's Race Studio 3 software open and you'll see down the right hand side here, I've got a number of different configurations. |
| 06:29 | You can think of the configuration as having all of the settings for that particular logger product stored into one. |
| 06:36 | It gives you a way of saving the blueprint of that entire logger and that means if I want to now transfer that configuration to a different logger if I have more than one of them, or if I want to save a whole lot of different configurations and I want to swap between them, say I'm doing a different configuration for different types of racing or different circuits I'm going to, this just is a really quick way to allow you to save and upload different configurations and keep track of them which is a really nice feature. |
| 07:00 | So the ones I've got on the right here, I've got the configuration for what we're going to be going through today for this worked example but I've also got some other configurations here for an AiM Solo which is a different product which is what we run in one of our own cars which is a little AiM Solo 2 removable logger unit. |
| 07:20 | But the one we're going to be concentrating on today is the one at the top here. |
| 07:23 | So I've got that open in this tab here and we'll head through each one of these tabs and just discuss exactly how we go ahead and set this thing up and what each one of these parameters are. |
| 07:31 | So this first tab up here, this channels tab, this is where we define which of the built in channels inside the dash logger we want to log. |
| 07:42 | So there are a whole lot of channels that will be available that are already pre configured inside this dash either from sensors it's got internally within it or sensors it's designed to have set up as default. |
| 07:53 | So you can see in this table, essentially this row of check boxes here is really important to understand, that just means if we've got a tick in there, that means we are going to log that channel and obviously if it's unticked, we're not going to log that channel. |
| 08:06 | So you can see we've got a whole lot of different channels pre configured in here for us, we've got RPM, speed, pressures some unnamed channels that are here that are just generic channel names that are unused. |
| 08:20 | Gyros, GPS, and altitude, odometer and luminosity which is simply the backlight strength of the dash which from what I understand, this dash has the ability to change its brightness in real time automatically based on how bright it is in the cabin which is quite a nice little feature. |
| 08:38 | So you can see we're actually not logging a huge number of the built in channels here. |
| 08:42 | So this RPM channel, this gives you the ability to hook up directly to, let's say the ignition coil or let's say on a more old school setup where you don't have RPM available on the CAN bus, you could hook up to the ignition coil or whatever source you've got for an RPM signal in your car, you could hook that up directly to the dashboard and take the engine RPM in there if you needed to. |
| 09:06 | We don't log that here because we can get that directly from the ECU over the CAN bus. |
| 09:10 | We've got 4 speed channels here and pretty obvious application for them is one for each wheel speed channel. |
| 09:17 | Again we don't need to log those here, we don't need to run separate wires or anything for them because they're actually already logged on the CAN bus but obviously if you didn't have this information already set up in your car, you could run external wheel speed sensors and you could wire them directly to the dashboard which is the purpose of these channels here but we don't need to make use of them. |
| 09:33 | We do have front and rear brake pressure which are logged here. |
| 09:38 | We've got the engine oil and the fuel pressure for the engine here and the last ones we've got logged here are some GPS channels as well as the odometer and the luminosity as well. |
| 09:51 | Heading across to the ECU stream, so this is where we're getting ECU data in over the main CAN bus. |
| 09:57 | So you can see up here, got this button for change ECU, the idea behind this one is that there are a whole lot of pre configured templates, so regardless of which model of car you're using or which model of ECU or wherever you're getting your CAN bus data, AiM provides a huge number of templates here, you can just select from straight away so you don't need to go ahead and configure your own CAN address system. |
| 10:21 | So you can see as I scroll through here there are an enormous number of manufacturers as I scroll down through here, whether it's OEMs, whether it's aftermarkets, whatever it is. |
| 10:30 | We've got the default one here of Seat Sport which is because even though this particular car is a VW, it shares a lot of electronics with the Seat TCR car. |
| 10:39 | You can see a huge number and within that Seat selection there we do have a number of different CAN configurations and all you need to do there is go ahead and select the right one for your car so that's pretty straightforward and you can see which one we've got selected up there. |
| 10:58 | The Seat Sport TCR marque 3 2017. |
| 11:01 | So the idea here is all you need to do is click on that template and it'll load everything straight into the list here and you can just go ahead and check and uncheck the things you want to log so there's a lot of different channels here, whether it's, do a little bit of a summary of them, whether it's torque information from the ECU, there's the RPM engine speed channel that we're getting over the CAN bus that I talked about before. |
| 11:25 | The inlet pressure, the throttle position, we've got some flags in there for whether the car is braking or not so the flags will often be used for indicating a status or an on/off condition. |
| 11:40 | So you'll often use things like flags for indicating whether a particular switch is on or off, it's just, to understand, a 1 or a 0 status light there. |
| 11:49 | It's useful to log sometimes. |
| 11:52 | So all of the different channels that are coming over the CAN bus, you can see we're logging here. |
| 11:57 | This one here for example is the gear position, so which gear we've currently got selected in the transmission. |
| 12:03 | The next one across is looking at the separate CAN bus or CAN two so the first one, the first CAN information we went through was CAN one. |
| 12:15 | If we want to connect to a completely separate CAN bus we can come to this tab here which is CAN two and we can connect to any of the other information that might be available on a separate CAN bus. |
| 12:25 | So in this particular case, this car has got information that we want to get on a separate CAN bus so we can see here we've got the steering wheel angle, we've got wheel speed information, what else have we got here? We've got the G force or the accelerometer channels down here. |
| 12:43 | Few temperatures and pressures and stuff like that. |
| 12:46 | The idea here is it just gives us the ability to hook up to a completely separate CAN bus and also bring that information. |
| 12:52 | The idea is we're taking all of these different data sources and sort of merging them into one source so we can then just look at one log file and have all this information in one place which is obviously, makes things much more convenient and easy to keep track of. |
| 13:04 | There's a CAN expanion section. |
| 13:06 | So we're not actually using any CAN expansions on this particular setup but we've got the option here to use lambda control, any of those additional channel expansions like I went through before, so whether it's analog inputs or temperatures. |
| 13:16 | If you wanted to run an external shift light module. |
| 13:20 | So obviously this dash logger does have a shift light module build into it already but if you did need an external one then you can come in here and use an external shift light module. |
| 13:30 | AiM also have a couple of other products here with external dashboards and steering wheels with dashes built into them but the idea here is it just gives you the ability to interface and pass information between any of those different components. |
| 13:42 | So math channels here, these are math channels that as opposed to math channels that we would compute inside the analysis software, these are computer onboard, inside the logger. |
| 13:51 | Now there are a couple of advantages to that. |
| 13:53 | The main one is that if you're sharing this data with anyone, they don't need those math channels defined inside their project to get that data. |
| 14:02 | So the idea here is that if they're computed inside the dash, it means that I can give this data to anyone else with a blank analysis project and they don't need to define those math channels, it's already defined for them. |
| 14:13 | It'll come through as a normal logged data channel. |
| 14:16 | As well it means we can use any of these channels that are computed in math it means we can use them live in real time inside the car so whether that's showing something to the driver on the dashboard, if we want to show something about brake bias which is for example this one here at the top, if we wanted to show brake bias to the driver in real time, we can do that because we're computing it in real time. |
| 14:37 | Alternatively you can also use those for onboard logic, so whether it's controlling, let's say for argument's sake you wanted to control your radiator fan or something like that, you can do some of that logic here like that. |
| 14:47 | In this particular case we don't need to do that because the ECU controls that but you can use it for external logic control as well. |
| 14:54 | So let's go through some of these here and I've opened up the brake bias one already. |
| 14:57 | So the way AiM manages its math channels, it essentially gives you some pre defined templates for common math operation. |
| 15:05 | So all we're doing in this case is we're using the ratio function and you can see the definition of it is defined down at the bottom down here. |
| 15:13 | We can see the format, it's using is channel one divided by channel one plus channel two. |
| 15:18 | Now all we need to do is come in here and give it some basic information like what we want to call the channel, what frequency we want to sample that, what the units are, how many decimal places we want to use and after that it's as simple as coming in here and selecting which channels we want to use so any of those channels we brought in, whether they were from an ECU or other CAN buses in this case, they'll all be available here for us to use for any math. |
| 15:42 | So I'll leave that selected as it is there which is the front and the rear. |
| 15:46 | So you can see first and second and they relate to channel one, channel one and channel two down here and it'll automatically complete that brake bias calculation for us. |
| 15:54 | Let's have a look, another one here, in this case, left wheel spin which is using a similar calculation, it's just giving us essentially the ratio between the left wheel speed to the total wheel speed. |
| 16:05 | So in this case channel one is front left and channel two is front right so it's just taking channel one divided by channel two plus channel one down there. |
| 16:14 | One of the downsides of using this sort of definition of math channel is that if you do want to go back and change that definition which does change over time, often you maybe find a more useful way to do your math channel calculation, maybe you want to update the definition of it, obviously this is going to be logged inside of the logger itself. |
| 16:34 | This is going to be logged as part of that log file. |
| 16:37 | So it doesn't really give you the ability to go back and update your calculation. |
| 16:40 | So that's why in some cases it can be better to do more or some of your calculations at least inside the analysis software rather than logging them inside the actual log file like we are here. |
| 16:51 | In this next tab here, in the status variables, this is just giving us the ability to flag a certain 1 or 0 condition, an on or an off if a certain number of conditions are true. |
| 17:00 | So we can make it equal to 1 condition or multiple conditions, it's just saying if this or if this plus this plus this are all true then do this and give me a status flag. |
| 17:11 | It just gives us one of those bit conditions, a 1 or a 0, an on or an off. |
| 17:16 | The parameters tab is a pretty important one, this is where lots of the really base level logging information is defined which is really important to get right. |
| 17:24 | So let's at the top here with the lap detection, so we've got two options here, we can use a GPS beacon or we can use an optical beacon. |
| 17:33 | So a GPS beacon's pretty self explanatory, obviously we just define the GPS coordinates for the start/finish line and the logger itself will really handle things from there. |
| 17:41 | The only thing we really need to make sure of is we define the track width here which is just that detcetion zone. |
| 17:49 | So you essentially give it a point to define the start/finish line and then give it a radius around which to define, which you sort of want to cover the whole track width. |
| 17:56 | The idea here is that wherever the car is on the start/finish line, you want to trigger than start/finish point. |
| 18:02 | So you just need to tweak that sometimes, sometimes you need to make it wider if you haven't got great GPS accuracy, if you're in a position with bad coverage. |
| 18:09 | Other times you want to make it a bit narrower. |
| 18:12 | If it's too big, it'll start covering other pieces of the track as you get close to the start/finish line so you generally want to avoid that. |
| 18:17 | This other section up here, which is the hold time is simply just how long that last lap time will hold for after you cross the start/finish line so let's say you finish a lap, that's telling you how long that last lap time will stay up on the dash for you. |
| 18:33 | So that is something that sometimes you want to be track specific. |
| 18:36 | Sometimes you want it to, if you're on a start, if the start/finish line is on a position with a long straight, you've got plenty of time to look down at the previous lap time to see how you did. |
| 18:45 | So in that case you might need something like this which is only 5 seconds. |
| 18:48 | In other tracks, you might have a situation where there is a braking zone or a corner really close to the start/finish line so you're not going to get a chance to look down at the previous lap time until you've negotiated that next section of track so it may well be that you need to negotiate two or three turns which might be 20 seconds later into the lap so in that case you might want to put a hold time of something more like 15 or 20 seconds or however long you need it to hold on for so you can actually look down at that previous lap and see how you went. |
| 19:13 | Obviously that is going to be something that's quite track specific. |
| 19:15 | The second option down here is using an optical beacon. |
| 19:17 | So that's using an external beacon to trigger the lap time. |
| 19:20 | Little bit more of an old school way to do things. |
| 19:22 | It is slightly, or can be slightly more accurate, particularly if you are careful to make sure you put it in the same position each time you revisit that track but it is a little bit more overhead that you need to have a beacon on the car, sorry a receiver on the car and a beacon on the side of the track and you need to take that track beacon and you need to set it up each time, you need to make sure it's got a charged battery, you need to make sure you're being repeatable with where you put it so while there is a small accuracy advantage to using something like an optical beacon, there is quite a lot more overhead that goes with it as well and obviously in this case we're just using the GPS beacon. |
| 19:53 | This reference speed channel down here, so we're not actually using the built in reference speed function here but essentially that just gives you, it's sort of like the master speed channel that the software uses to do most of its calculations, in this case we're using a different speed channel, not one of the built in supplied ones here. |
| 20:10 | And we've got this one down here for start data recording which is really important to get right but this is defining when the logger's actually going to start recording so depending on the different logger systems, there's all sorts of different ways this can work. |
| 20:23 | Really really basic one, sometimes you have to manually press record, saying I want you to start recording now. |
| 20:28 | In a situation like this, which is pretty typical of most more sophisticated loggers, you give it a set of conditions that must be true and if those conditions are met, it will start logging. |
| 20:37 | The advantage with that is obviously you don't need to remember to start recording with this thing, you can just get in the car and concentrate on driving and as long as those conditions are true, and all of your channels that are triggering those conditions are active then it'll go ahead and start logging for you which is a big advantage, certainly in my experience it can be really difficult to remember something basic like turning the logger on because you're usually just concentrating on other things. |
| 21:01 | You're probably thinking about what's going to happen on track and not making sure your logger is working. |
| 21:05 | And certainly if you are making use of logged data, there's really nothing worse than realising that you missed a run because the logger didn't start recording in the first place. |
| 21:13 | So the way this particular one is working, it's saying we've got an option here for any and all. |
| 21:18 | Any is the way it's been set by default here but we can click onto all. |
| 21:21 | All this means, both of or all of these conditions must be true for it to work. |
| 21:25 | In this case they've got it set to any so it's just saying that the front left wheel velocity must be greater than 10 km/h and the engine RPM must be greater than 500 so essentially that's just a mathematical way of saying that the car must be moving faster than 10 km/h and the engine's got to be running and if that's the case, then it'll start logging. |
| 21:46 | The next tab across is looking at the shift lights and alarms. |
| 21:50 | So there's a couple of different types of lights in this logger than we need to be aware of how they work. |
| 21:56 | So there's this little button here to activate a simulation which I'll click here. |
| 21:59 | It just gives a graphic representation of how they're going to look when the car's on track so this one at the top here is used for our shift light. |
| 22:07 | So obviously that's triggering when the driver should be shifting to the next gear. |
| 22:12 | And these ones down the sides here are usually more used for warning or indication lights. |
| 22:17 | Doesn't always have to be something going wrong, it might be used for something like telling the driver that the pit limiter's on or any other conditions that you might want to use that for, you can show those down the side there. |
| 22:28 | So the definition of the shift lights here, it's really simple. |
| 22:30 | Obviously all we need to do is go ahead and type in the RPM shift points and we can come in here and define the colour for each one of these, how we want those to work. |
| 22:39 | So we've actually got it gear dependent on this car so you can see the different gears down here, we've got 6 speed gearbox and you can see that you've got the potential to come down here and tweak the shift points for each gear. |
| 22:52 | So that is something that you're usually going to want to do, you don't normally want the same shift points in each gear. |
| 22:57 | If you're taking a really simple approach, that's fine. |
| 22:58 | If you are going to use gear dependent shift points, using something like the resource we gave away in the course to help you define your custom shift points is something you'll want to make use of. |
| 23:08 | Mostly this is down to each, well there's two things going on here, there's the different shift point to maximise the torque supply to the wheels depending on the different gear ratios and your specific torque curve that you've got for your powertrain and the other thing is that in each gear, because you're changing the gear ratio, the engine speed is going to ramp up at different speeds. |
| 23:28 | So normally at lower speeds you need to have a larger offset so the driver doesn't miss the shift point you need to have it come in slightly earlier in the lower gears than you do in the higher gears just simply because the engine accelerates more slowly in the higher gears. |
| 23:40 | So this is where we set up all of the shift lights in here. |
| 23:44 | We also have our warning lights down here so the idea here is behind each one of these lines, this is a condition that we can use to trigger a warning light. |
| 23:53 | So let's come down here and see what some of them are. |
| 23:58 | If we've got, pit limiter is a good example. |
| 24:00 | So if I double click on this, we can come in here and give it a name. |
| 24:04 | All we need to do is put the conditions in here so it's saying what condition do we want to trigger this? And we've got a pit limiter which in this particular case is coming over the CAN bus from a switch when the pit limiter is triggered or it could also be coming from the ECU as well when the pit limter is being active and down here is where we configure what lights we want to show and also for any messages. |
| 24:29 | So in this particular case we've got red lights for LED 1 and LED 5. |
| 24:35 | Let's move this out of the way so we can see what those are. |
| 24:37 | So LED 1 is here and LED 2 is over here and the idea here is that both of those will be flashing, blinking red and we'll also get a message up there for pit limter somewhere on the screen where that will tell us that is active. |
| 24:52 | Now that can be a good troubleshooting, something like this is a good example of a troubleshooting thing. |
| 24:56 | If the driver's on track and they're kind of panicking because maybe they've bumped the pit limit button by mistake and the car is suddenly stuck at 40 km/h or however fast the pit limit is for your particular race series, just having those lights flashing, having that message up there just helps them debug that situation, it's certainly something I've seen before where the driver, in a moment of panic can't work out why the car's not accelerating properly and it's just simply because the pit limiter's on. |
| 25:20 | Now we can come in here and define different ways these different colours for the lights that can come on and also change the blinking frequency, whether they're continuous, whether they flash, whether they flash slow, whether they flash fast, stuff like that. |
| 25:37 | And down here we've got this until condition which is just saying until the condition is no longer met which is just saying, when that pit limit status becomes false or when it gets turned off, these indications to the driver will stop showing. |
| 25:50 | So you can see there's a lot of different messages and everything configured down there. |
| 25:54 | Whether it's things like oil pressure warnings whether it's things like wheel spin lights or whatever you want to use, you can configure those lights, they're actually really really flexible, you can do a lot with them. |
| 26:04 | The next tab across is the trigger commands tab which you can use, essentially it's a little bit of logic control. |
| 26:10 | In this case, the only one that we've got custom here is this next page. |
| 26:16 | So the idea here is that we'll have a button map to the display so you can just, the driver can click and you can go between multiple pages which we'll see in the next tab which is the display tab. |
| 26:27 | So this tab here is giving us the different display pages and the idea here is that we can have a whole lot of different displays which we can tab through with that display page button that I was talking about before. |
| 26:38 | So you'd usually have a display page that is shown by default to the driver when they're on track, you also might have some different pages set up for reliability checks or for the mechanics when they want to go through and calibrate sensors or make sure everything's running properly, particularly when they're doing their warm up on the car. |
| 26:54 | So let's have a look through here how all of those work. |
| 26:58 | So we've got the default driver page up the top here and we can see that we've got lots of different elements, so as I hover over them you can actually see how each one of them is highlighted and in this table down the bottom here you can see that the context switches depending on which one we've got highlighted as well. |
| 27:16 | So for argument's sake, let's click on lap time here and you can see when I selected that, it's come over here and it's highlighted in the bottom right, which parameter I want to look at. |
| 27:29 | So let's come back here, if I just click lap time, you can see that the lap time is currently highlighted so you can come down here and select any of these different channels that you want to but we'll leave it there defined as the lap time. |
| 27:44 | So we've also got this one down here which is the delta to the best lap time which is obviously something that's going to be really useful and in a lot of cases the driver, they're going to be tracking how they're going on track based on that time delta which is that time variance channel that we've discussed at length inside the course. |
| 28:03 | We've also got the ability to come down here and do some customisation so while we can come in the bottom right is where we select which channel we want to sit in each spot on the dash. |
| 28:13 | On the bottom left here we've got the ability to come in here and customise it so we can come across here to the text and we can modify the text. |
| 28:21 | On some of them we can modify things like units and scale, stuff like that. |
| 28:25 | So by just clicking on this little button here we can get access to any of these. |
| 28:31 | Also we've got the ability to show or hide different elements by checking and unchecking those boxes. |
| 28:41 | So if we move down here to this second page, this particular team, I can see here they've put a V2 here next to it so they've essentially just made a modified version of the driver page which we've got a whole lot more parameters being shown on here. |
| 28:55 | So whether it's the fuel level, whether it's information about the pit limiter being on or not, we've got the lap number and the water temperature for the engine is shown there. |
| 29:07 | We've got this check page down here which is a little bit what I was talking about before which is the sort of page the mechanics might use when the car's parked in the pits or when you're doing your warmup in the morning. |
| 29:15 | So the idea here is that we can just bring a whole lot of information onto the dash that you can just click scroll on the dash and, on the steering wheel and that'll come across and show up some of the most useful parameters that the mechanics might want to be looking at. |
| 29:30 | So again we can come down here and modify any fo the different parameters that are shown down here when we highlight each one of these here so we've got the front and rear brake pressure down here, we've got the brake balance which is something you might want to see when you're doing your warmup as well as part of your procedure if you've got a standard brake balance you want to start with. |
| 29:48 | The idea here is that when you're in the pit lane, or sorry when you're in the pits you can just press down on the brake pedal and mechanically tune that brake bias to whatever position that you want to set it to. |
| 29:57 | We've got wheel speeds here, the clutch pressure, the steering angle, stuff like this, particularly steering angle is something you probably want to check, make sure the steering is straight, make sure the steering sensor is calibrated properly. |
| 30:08 | So you'd be sitting there in the pit lane and making sure that all of that stuff is zeroed and calibrated properly. |
| 30:15 | We've got a second check page here which is a little bit more focused on engine parameters so we've got water temperature, engine oil temperature, the inlet air temperature, the manifold pressure, gearbox temperature, stuff like this. |
| 30:28 | We've got lambdas down here. |
| 30:30 | Again just another way to go ahead and check any of those parameters, just making it nice and convenient without having to plug into the dash or have a look at it on your laptop, you can just look at all this stuff on the main screen there. |
| 30:42 | The next tab across is the SmartyCam configuration which as I said before is just AiM's native camera system so you can interface with different cameras but I find it usually makes sense to use the camera system that's designed to go with the logger that you're using and that's what's happening in this case. |
| 30:58 | We've got the different pieces of information that are being shared with the camera system. |
| 31:04 | So the idea here is you can share that camera file or recorded file and it'll have, you've got the ability to have a heads up display to go ahead and show different information overlaid on top of the video which is a nice little feature. |
| 31:20 | The last tab here is the CAN output. |
| 31:22 | So this can be nice if you want to go ahead and export any CAN data, that's how you can kind of think of this is a lot of the can setup we've talked about so far has been about collecting all different CAN data from different sources. |
| 31:34 | With this particular AiM product you have the ability to send CAN data out as well. |
| 31:38 | So it might be that you have another system on the bus that you want to specifically configure CAN information for, and that's what this is for, it's for sending it back out on the bus. |
| 31:47 | So not going to go through this in a huge amount of detail but you can see here we're sending out the lap number, both of the front and the rear brake pressure, the GPS speed, the engine fuel pressure and the engine oil pressure, they are all being sent out there on the bus. |
| 32:01 | So now that we've gone through all of that configuration, all you need to do now once you've got the settings you're happy with is send that configuration to the dash logger. |
| 32:09 | As I said before, with the AiM system it's really simple, all you need to do is to be connected to the logger over a WiFi, over its local WiFi network and you can just send it to it really quickly. |
| 32:19 | And then you don't need to be connected to it to make the changes, what you can do is you can download the configuration onto your laptop, you can go away and make the changes that you want, you don't need to be connected through that phase. |
| 32:28 | You only need to be connected when you actually want to send that configuration to the dash. |
| 32:33 | At this point it's worth going ahead and downloading some data once you've uploaded your configuration, just going through that data, making sure it all makes sense, making things like the temperatures, the pressures, the position channels, all pass the sanity check, making sure they make sense and at this point, once you're happy with all of that and you've got no bugs in any of your logging, you are ready to head out onto track and see what your log data looks like. |
