Data Analysis Fundamentals: Configuring a Channel Report
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Configuring a Channel Report
05.57
| 00:00 | - One of the really useful things we went through in the body of the course was making use of channel reports. |
| 00:05 | Using channel reports allows you to look at a huge amount of data really quickly without having to go through a time/distance plot of lap by lap by lap to look for any issues or problems. |
| 00:16 | Each analysis software is going to be a little bit different when it comes to setting up channel reports. |
| 00:20 | I'm going to use MoTeC's i2 software to give you a demo on how I set them up. |
| 00:24 | So inside MoTeC's i2 software here, I've just got a blank canvas so I'm just going to add in a channel report and straight away it brings up a dialogue to define some of the parts within that report. |
| 00:36 | So I'm just going to call this reliability report and straight away one of the options we see here is to report on either laps or outings or all loaded outings. |
| 00:48 | I'll come back to that, I'll just define it first and it'll become more clear what that is. |
| 00:53 | So to start with, let's define the channels we're going to do our reporting on. |
| 00:56 | So I'm going to start with an engine temperature. |
| 01:02 | So engine temp is here. |
| 01:05 | I'll add in some oil, information about the engine oil. |
| 01:09 | So engine oil temp, we can also do engine oil pressure. |
| 01:16 | And let's do one for diff temp as well. |
| 01:20 | So for each of these channels we've got the option to choose from different statistics for that channel that will be automatically completed on a per lap basis and it's going to depend on which channel you're looking at whether you're most interested in average, a maximum or a minimum. |
| 01:33 | So let's got through and select the statistics that we want to use for each of these channels. |
| 01:37 | So for engine oil temperature, it makes sense for us to look at the maximum per lap. |
| 01:41 | For engine oil temp again the maximum. |
| 01:43 | For the pressure let's look at the minimum and for the diff oil let's look at the maximum and the average. |
| 01:50 | You can see we've got lots of different statistics options along the top here. |
| 01:52 | Min, max, the range, so that's the most it changes over a lap, the average, the absolute max, the start and the end and the change as well as a standard deviation for each lap. |
| 02:04 | So if I just press OK on that you can see straight away we've got only one lap shown here but we've got each of our channels shown down the side. |
| 02:13 | Maximum, maximum, minimum and max and average for the diff oil temperature. |
| 02:20 | So to fix that, I'm just going to go back into the definition. |
| 02:22 | This is where this option for selected laps versus selected outings comes in. |
| 02:26 | So at the moment if it's set on selected laps, it's only going to break down those statistics for that selected lap so all we need to do is go selected outings. |
| 02:34 | And also while I'm at it I'm just going to get rid of some of this information at the top here that we don't need. |
| 02:38 | It's just cluttering up what we're looking at so if I get rid of that, it just takes it down there. |
| 02:43 | There's one other thing I want to do now that we've got all of our laps shown along in this direction. |
| 02:48 | Just going to make it a little bit easier to view and make better use of our screen space. |
| 02:50 | I'm just going to redefine that as, if we go to the display section, show it in columns rather than rows. |
| 02:59 | So here you can see all of our laps listed down the side and each of our channels along the top here that we've got automatic statistics being shown for. |
| 03:06 | So I'll just drag that over. |
| 03:08 | You can also see one of the handy things that MoTeC does, is it gives you the same values that are in the tables, it automatically plots them. |
| 03:13 | This can be useful to see different trends throughout a run. |
| 03:16 | So if we scroll down there, we can automatically see we've got the maximum and minimums already calculated for us. |
| 03:23 | Let's say I just finished a run on track, I've downloaded the data, the first thing I'm going to check is my reliability channels. |
| 03:28 | If I scan through here and look for the maximum oil temperature, I can see here it's automatically highlighted on lap 41 for me. |
| 03:36 | Having a look here across my plot I can see that peak. |
| 03:39 | If I want to look at that in a little more detail, a great way to do that is in the time/distance plot. |
| 03:44 | So I know where to look now, if I just skip across I've got a time/distance plot already set up here and you can see for a whole run if I go to the engine oil temperature, if I look at lap 41 I can either zoom in on it manually or I can even just double click on that lap and it'll zoom me to it straight away. |
| 04:01 | So I can see, this is our maximum at 119 on lap 41. |
| 04:05 | Along with the rest of the reliability channels that I had shown in the channel report. |
| 04:11 | One of the things I find really helpful which is also one of the things I touched on in the AiM example is having a full out/in plot of the speed trace. |
| 04:20 | This just gives us a lot more context for where the car was on track when each event happened. |
| 04:24 | In this case here I can see the position that we're zoomed to within the log file is shown by this green box here and as I change the zoom level in and out you can see more and less of that is shown. |
| 04:35 | One of the things we usually want to understand in these reliability channels is to understand the cause. |
| 04:40 | So we can see straight away in the out/in plot here that the position we're looking at is actually when the car was stopped on track where we can see the speed trace dropping off to zero so this is when the car has stopped in the pit lane, that's where we've ended up with head soak and we can see all of our temperatures creep up as a result. |
| 04:56 | So you can see how that out/in plot is really helpful to give us a little more context around what's happening. |
| 05:00 | Whether it's because the car stopped on track or whether it's because of a stopping in the pit lane or maybe a safety car period. |
| 05:07 | Having that out/in plot down the bottom just gives you a lot more context to understand what was happening when a certain reliability channel went out of a range you were expecting. |
| 05:15 | One of the things I already highlighted was that often you'll get maximums or minimums spikes in your channels when the car's stopped on track. |
| 05:22 | So that's the situation where the highlighting for the maximum and minimums isn't actually doing us that much good. |
| 05:28 | Often you'll end up with heat soak and you'll end up with your maximum temperatures when the car comes back into the pit lane. |
| 05:33 | One of the ways you can get around that is by calculating your own statistics with math channels to ignore values when you're in the pit lane. |
| 05:39 | That means you can then add those new math channels back into your channel report rather than using the raw channels that you get straight from the logger. |
| 05:46 | That helps you make use of those maximum and minimum functions more effectively without giving you erroneous values when the car's sitting in the pit lane. |
