Data Analysis Fundamentals: Step 1: Set up Data Analysis System
Watch This Course
$129 USD $64.50 USD
-OR-
Or
8 easy payments of only $8.06
Instant access. Easy checkout. No fees.
Step 1: Set up Data Analysis System
20.13
| 00:00 | - Before we're ready to head to the track and gather our data, regardless of what type of logger you're using, we need to go ahead and configure everything before we can make use of it. |
| 00:09 | Now one of the advantages obviously of using a cellphone for this is that there is much less overhead than most data loggers. |
| 00:16 | We don't need to power this thing, all we really need to do is mount it, there's not necessarily any external wiring or anything like that. |
| 00:23 | So it's a really low overhead to get going. |
| 00:25 | Now once you've got this thing physically mounted to the car, the next step is going to be to configure it. |
| 00:30 | Now what the recommendation from the manufacturer of this app is just to make sure that you've got the phone mounted securely and ideally somewhere that's in view of the driver. |
| 00:40 | Not only that, you also want this to be as steadily mounted as possible. |
| 00:44 | That's going to help both with the data that you're going to gather and also of the quality of the GPS reception. |
| 00:51 | The GPS is a big part of all of these data logging apps. |
| 00:54 | That's because it's using the built in GPS sensor inside the phone. |
| 00:58 | As we'll see a bit later on, it is possible to use an external GPS sensor but by default and for the example we're going to do today, we're going to be using the built in GPS sensor in the phone. |
| 01:07 | Now for that to be successful we need the phone to have as good of a view of he sky as possible. |
| 01:12 | So usually that means mounting it somewhere on the dashboard, somewhere underneath the windscreen which is convenient because it means that the driver can see the phone at the same time. |
| 01:20 | So when we turn the app on for the first time, this is going to be the home screen. |
| 01:23 | Now there are a couple of different modes you can switch through. |
| 01:27 | At the moment you can see we're in circuit mode, to switch between them all we need to do is to swipe to the side, then we've got the option to use a segment type which is something you might use for something where you're not competing on a circuit, so something like a rally stage or something like that, maybe an auto cross. |
| 01:41 | You've also got a drag race mode you can choose from there as well. |
| 01:45 | And a 4x4 rock crawling and trail mode as well. |
| 01:50 | It's also got this option in here where you can look at any raw data that you're receiving. |
| 01:55 | Whether it's data from inside the phone or data you're receiving from something external. |
| 01:59 | As we'll see a little bit later on, the phone can actually, sorry the app can accept external data as well, whether it's an OBD2 or external sensors. |
| 02:07 | But the circuit mode is what we're going to concentrate on today and I think that's probably what most people are going to be making use of as well. |
| 02:13 | So we'll go through each one of these buttons in detail but essentially this is the one we're on here, this setup mode. |
| 02:20 | We've also got the camera preview button here, we've got the record button which is where we go when we actually want to start logging information. |
| 02:28 | And then we've got this folder view down here which is where we can access all of our previously logged data. |
| 02:35 | Now to access the main options in the app, it's just as simple as going to this little i button up here. |
| 02:42 | So you can see we've got a few different options we need to go through here to understand what's going on. |
| 02:46 | To start with, there are a couple of different help files. |
| 02:48 | So there's a quick start guide which is a nice little prompt for the basics. |
| 02:53 | So you can head through the different screens here and it gives you a little bit of information, how to get up and going. |
| 02:59 | This is where it recommends how to mount the phone, so you can see up here it says to, they recommend to use a sturdy mount on the windscreen and not to use the phone anywhere inside the phone or in your pocket which would be a pretty bad idea for the GPS reception in particular. |
| 03:14 | There's a little bit of information about how to get started and start logging. |
| 03:19 | Also the information here about how you go ahead and view the information once you've actually logged it. |
| 03:25 | So let's head back. |
| 03:32 | So if we head back into the main options again, there's also the option to get to the full user guide, so if you want to get the whole experience with seeing every last detail, they've got a pretty detailed help file here. |
| 03:43 | Going from the top we've got how to sort out the track mode and selection, the different GPS options and different inputs. |
| 03:50 | We've got the different camera and recording options and previews. |
| 03:54 | A section here on how to record a session and also what all the different parameters you're going to have showing on your screen while you're on track look like as well. |
| 04:03 | There is a whole section here looking all at the data in the video, so talking about how you access it, how it works and how it's laid out. |
| 04:12 | Now underneath this is the units, so we can either choose from miles per hour and feet, imperial units, or metric units, km/h and metres which is what I'm going to leave it on. |
| 04:22 | Metric units of km/h and metres. |
| 04:25 | You've got an option here to set your app permissions. |
| 04:27 | Now in most cases you're going to be wanting to leave the app permissions, you're going to want to give it access to everything. |
| 04:33 | Obviously different phones are going to be a little bit different how they work, I'm using an iPhone here but regardless whether you're using an iPhone or an Android, I'm sure a lot of this process is going to be similar. |
| 04:43 | We want to give the app access to things like the camera, the phone, the GPS, stuff like that. |
| 04:48 | So that's all pretty self explanatory obviously it just, it's important you give it access to everything it needs in order to gather all the data properly. |
| 04:56 | Now we've got a couple of different ways we can lay out the dashboard here. |
| 05:00 | So this will become a little bit more obvious when we see some of the data later but essentially we can show some things to the driver when the car is on track. |
| 05:08 | So this top line here is about what we want, what timing information we want to show the driver or what, so in this mode here we're talking about showing the predicted lap time which is what's selected, we can also hide it completely, we can show a basic lap time output but I'm going to leave it on predicted. |
| 05:25 | That's what is going to be most useful to the driver to show them how far away they are from their target lap time. |
| 05:32 | It's going to show them what their predicted lap time is compared to how they've gone on track, using the previous fastest lap time in this run. |
| 05:42 | We've got the option to show or hide the map here, so we can have that on or off. |
| 05:45 | We've got the option here, there's three different pieces of data we can select from and we can show up to three of them on track at the same time. |
| 05:53 | So by default, there are the default settings here, data A is set at nothing, so there's nothing here but we can come in here and set any of these channels that we can show live to the driver. |
| 06:07 | The next one down here is by default is set as speed which I'm happy with. |
| 06:13 | Obviously the units km/h. |
| 06:16 | If we want to show that or not. |
| 06:18 | Then we've got the option to use the alert which is essentially just a way to, it's a little bit meaningless when we've got it working with things like speed and lap distance, we're unlikely to show alerts but we do have the ability to bring in external data here so if you're doing that, you might want to use some sort of warning system which you can come in here and select the value that you want the alert to happen at and whether that should happen below or above that value, obviously that's going to depend on the sort of thing that you're alerting to, something like oil pressure for example. |
| 06:47 | So let's head back into the options here. |
| 06:50 | So we've got a couple of different options around how we want the alerts to work. |
| 06:55 | So if any alerts are set in your display configuration then we can keep them silent, we can have them normal which will sound like that and then we've got an urgent option as well. |
| 07:06 | So there's an interesting option down here for pit speed and we'll see when we go through the track configuration options we've got the ability to tell the app where the pit entry and pit exit are. |
| 07:15 | So it can give us some feedback here as to where we are with respect to our pit speed. |
| 07:20 | So most tracks here in New Zealand, 40 km/h is the mandated pit speed but you do have the ability to change that in increments of 5. |
| 07:28 | And then we've got different options here to alert the driver. |
| 07:31 | So off, obviously there's going to be nothing for the driver. |
| 07:34 | Silent, it's just going to show something to them on the screen but not going to make any sound. |
| 07:38 | Normal and urgent options as well. |
| 07:41 | We've also got the option as far as an audible alert for different lap, every time you increment a lap, whether it tells you, sorry it tells you that you've incremented a lap or done a lap. |
| 07:51 | So that would be the basic one and then... - [App] 1 minute 33.7 seconds. |
| 07:59 | - Which may or may not be practical depending on your situation. |
| 08:03 | In my experience, the car is so noisy you haven't got a hope in hell of hearing that thing playing when it's in the car but depending, maybe you've got ear buds in, maybe you can hear this on track, I'm sure it's going to be different for everyone. |
| 08:15 | Now this is a pretty important section here, we've got the option to choose which GPS source we're using. |
| 08:23 | So standard is going to be the built in phone's GPS. |
| 08:26 | We've also got the options to use two different external GPS sensors here. |
| 08:31 | So there's two different ones that come pre configured, from what I understand these usually hook up over Bluetooth as well. |
| 08:37 | So the ability or the advantage of using an external GPS sensor is that you're going to get even better GPS coverage because you're going to be able to mount that thing outside the car, somewhere on the roof or somewhere it's going to have a good view of the sky which is a really helpful thing for improving the GPS quality.. |
| 08:52 | If you have it set on one of these, by default if there's nothing connected to it, if it doesn't see anything connected, it will revert automatically back to the built in GPS inside the phone. |
| 09:06 | The autostart feature is about for the app to understand whether you've started driving the car or not and it's just got the option here to look at, you can tell it whether to use GPS only or GPS and acceleration which I'm going to leave it on its default setting there. |
| 09:22 | Now one of the really nice things about this app is we do have the ability to take external data from the OBD system with an onboard diagnostic system which means if you do have a car that's got onboard diagnostics, what people would often call, you would often see in an OBD2 port which is the way a lot of different devices can interface with your car. |
| 09:43 | Essentially it allows us to get information from the OBD2 port and bring it into the app. |
| 09:49 | So what that usually looks like is a little dongle which you can plug into that standardised port on your car and then it's designed to interface directly with the app. |
| 09:56 | Now you can go to the Track Addict website and see all the different options there but essentially it's just a little dongle you plug into the car and then you can come in here and make it work with the app. |
| 10:08 | That gives you the ability to bring in any information that is available to you on the onboard diagnostic plug so that can be engine speed parameters or if you've got brake pressure information, whatever, you can bring all of that into the app and log that as well. |
| 10:23 | We have got an ability down here to put in additional sensors. |
| 10:27 | So there is this protocol they're referring here to as NBP. |
| 10:33 | So anything, any external sensors that you might be using on your car. |
| 10:38 | You can also bring those in and communicate to that thing over WiFi as well, you can come in here and set the IP import number if you're using the WiFi to communicate with that, there's a little bit of information in the help file about that as well if that's something that's interesting to you. |
| 10:53 | There is this option down here for live telemetry which is quite a nice feature, essentially it allows you to stream everything that's happening live off the phone over the internet so the idea is that you can be recording this in the car and someone can be viewing this live. |
| 11:07 | Anyone that's got an internet connection in theory and the app should be able to view this information as well. |
| 11:13 | There's also the option to have a web viewer there which you can share that link with someone which is really nice. |
| 11:18 | So the idea is anyone on a computer could be watching live with what you're doing. |
| 11:22 | It's not a feature we're going to be using today but it is I think quite a nice feature in general so that you have the ability to stream off, private or public. |
| 11:30 | You can include the OBD data as well, so obviously in some cases you might want to keep that private, so you can switch that to off. |
| 11:38 | You've obviously got a couple of IDs here that you can use to share with people. |
| 11:42 | And then some information about connecting to the stream and stuff like that. |
| 11:46 | So the last things that we need to go through here, there's this live data monitor which is quite nice in that it is giving us the, from the built in sensors that we have inside the phone, it's giving us some information about what those sensors are giving us in real time which is quite a nice feature. |
| 12:05 | You can see here we're putting 360 metres odd above sea level, you can see the acceleration inputs in there as well which is quite a nice feature, just being able to troubleshoot those by looking at them live in real time. |
| 12:18 | The last thing I want to go through here is that we have the ability to hook up to an external camera. |
| 12:22 | So by default, and the way we're going to use this app today, we have recorded the data using the onboard camera in the phone which is obviously more than up to the job as far as quality and everything. |
| 12:33 | It also reduces the amount of overhead but we do have the ability to hook up external cameras here. |
| 12:39 | So there are a couple of pre configured cameras between a Go Pro and a Garmin, 360fly, stuff like that. |
| 12:44 | You can go ahead and use those so what this mode is all about is giving you the ability to automatically start and stop those cameras recording from the application. |
| 12:54 | So it can handle all of that for you. |
| 12:57 | You've also got an option down there to use the stabilisation mode which is obviously going to be camera dependent as well. |
| 13:03 | So that's it for the main setup of the app. |
| 13:06 | The next setup I wanted to go through was the track selection, and there are a couple of different ways we can do that. |
| 13:11 | So we're going to come down here and I'm going to go select track. |
| 13:15 | So there are a few different tracks I've got selected in here., You can either select them from a predefined list which there is a pretty big database already of all of the different tracks that people have used in the past but you do have the ability to make a track for yourself and I'll go through that as an example. |
| 13:30 | So as far as adding a new track or selecting a new track it's really simple, we've got a couple of options. |
| 13:36 | We can come in here, add new track, so we can either search by name, we can search nearby tracks or we can also add a custom track. |
| 13:43 | So if I just go and search nearby tracks, while we have got a pretty good list of tracks that are relatively close by to our current location, we don't actually have the track that is closest to us which is Highlands Motorsport Park which is where we gathered the data from. |
| 14:03 | So we do have the ability to make that from scratch which we can do with add custom track. |
| 14:07 | What I'm going to do is just make an example here. |
| 14:15 | So the way this works, after you've named your track, is that you can, you've got a couple of different ways of defining the start/finish line which is obviously the most important thing we need when we're going to go through and record a lap time is that we need to know when the lap starts and when it finishes so there's some nice features here. |
| 14:31 | If we know the position of the start/finish line we can just come straight away and type it in in terms of latitude and longitude. |
| 14:38 | Alternatively we can set it with GPS using the map so there's a couple of different ways we can do that. |
| 14:45 | One of the ways you can do it is stand on the position of the start/finish line and simply click that button. |
| 14:52 | And that will take your current position and you can set that as the coordinates. |
| 14:59 | So you can come here and say that and this has automatically selected our coordinates for us. |
| 15:04 | Alternatively if you're not, if you're not able to get onto the racetrack surface which is definitely a case sometimes you can't get access to the racetrack, maybe there's a live event going on or something or maybe you want to set this before you actually arrive at the track. |
| 15:18 | So using this map function you can simply just hold there, let's say I want to put my start finish line there and that records it all for us which is actually I think a really nice feature. |
| 15:27 | Now we have got the ability here to use different gate widths. |
| 15:30 | So we can use narrow, standard or wide. |
| 15:32 | So a little bit of that is going to depend on the accuracy of your GPS but also how close any other part of the track comes to the start/finish line. |
| 15:42 | So this is essentially the area of interest it's going to use as far as defining that start/finish line. |
| 15:48 | What you do have to be careful of here and it's something we've talked about inside the course as well is that you don't want to make this area of, that it's looking for the start finish line any bigger than it needs to be. |
| 15:59 | Ideally we would have it as small as possible and if you've got a good GPS signal that's really what you want to do. |
| 16:03 | The downside of using a wide one like this is if, or one of them is if you have a section of track, which we actually do at Highlands which starts approaching the start/finish line before it comes back around to this part of the circuit, then you've got the problem where the car could possibly trigger a fake start/finish line which is obviously not what we want to do if we want to gather the information accurately. |
| 16:26 | So like I alluded to before, we've also got the ability to add pit entry and pit exit which I'll show you where I've got those set up in the Highlands Track that I made as a custom track. |
| 16:38 | It doesn't, it's really exactly the same process as the start/finish line so I won't go through that again, we do have the ability to also add sectors and we can add the sector points in exactly the same way we did with the start/finish line as well. |
| 16:49 | So that's how you go ahead and you define the track for yourself. |
| 16:53 | Now if I go into the Highlands circuit which is the one I made when we went and did the filming. |
| 17:00 | So you can see here I've got the start/finish line set, I've got the pit entry and the pit exit on there as well. |
| 17:06 | So if we just go have a look at that. |
| 17:09 | You can see here, I've just gone in and selected the position of the start/finish line. |
| 17:12 | And here you can see this section of track that loops back close towards the main start/finish so you would have to be careful of not having to have this detection zone set too big. |
| 17:25 | But I just did this actually when I was standing in the pits and I was able to set that position because I wasn't actually able to access the track at that point so I couldn't use my current location as such but that gives you the main layout of the circuit we're going to be using today. |
| 17:39 | Once you've gone ahead and selected the track, either by making it or choosing from their database, all you need to do is to select it here and then that is what's going to be selected, now we can see down here, it tells us which circuit is going to be active and the next step is going to be going ahead and recording that data. |
| 17:54 | So that's it for the main configuration of the app. |
| 17:57 | The last thing we need to do before we're ready to head out on track is to go ahead and configure the main display that the driver's going to see when they're on track. |
| 18:04 | So down here we can access the controls that are going to be shown to the driver. |
| 18:09 | Got a little camera button down here, I'm just going to flip this around 'cause that's the orientation that we're going to be looking at when we're on track and I'll just hold that phone up there. |
| 18:17 | You can see that we're using the front facing camera there, that's the default camera that we're going to have access to. |
| 18:23 | So starting from the top here, what we've got is we can choose which camera we're going to be using. |
| 18:30 | So obviously almost always you're going to be using the back camera or the camera on the far side of the screen here because you'll want the screen facing back towards the user. |
| 18:37 | And that means you're going to be using that front facing camera. |
| 18:40 | So once we go ahead and select the camera that we want to use, we do have the option to choose from different resolutions here. |
| 18:45 | Now you can see we've got quite a wide range of resolutions we can choose from. |
| 18:49 | I've left it at the default 1080p but one of the things you do have to be aware of it depending on which resolution you use here, it is going to increase your file size quite a lot if you want to use high resolution. |
| 19:01 | Typically that will, particularly that highest resolution there, it's going to be making the files much larger which depending on the amount of storage you've got in your phone, it's maybe a positive or negative but it's just something to be aware of. |
| 19:12 | So down the side here we've got some more options and these are actually the same ones we went through in the main configuration of the main settings but I'll go through those briefly again. |
| 19:21 | So by tapping here we've got the option to show how we want to show that timer, whether we want to show it hidden, basic lap time perspective or lap time prediction. |
| 19:30 | Whether we want to hide or show the track map and then we've got those three different data channels here which we've got shown in the display down here. |
| 19:38 | So we've got predicted lap time, we've got our speed and how far into the lap we are. |
| 19:45 | And obviously we've got some information down here showing us what our GPS signal strength is like and also obviously our camera which is a pretty important part of the app as well. |
| 19:55 | So that's it for step one, we've gone ahead and configured the phone fully. |
| 19:58 | All we need to do now is mount it securely to the car. |
| 20:01 | So get yourself a decent mount that's going to stop the phone moving around too much, make sure it's in a position where it has good GPS reception and we're ready to head out on track and start recording. |
