Data Analysis Fundamentals: Channel Reports
Channel Reports
02.24
00:00 | - As you gain more experience and start adding more channels to your datalogging package, you're going to need to develop a time efficient manner of analysing a lot of data quickly so that you can highlight any potential problems and deal with them. |
00:14 | One of the tools available to do exactly that is a channel report. |
00:18 | A channel report will provide us with maximum, minimum and average values for a particular channel either during a single lap or across an entire session comprising of multiple laps. |
00:31 | This can be a useful way of analysing large amounts of data where you're most interested in looking at maximum or minimum values instead of watching how the channel changes over the course of a lap. |
00:42 | Channel reports are ideal for monitoring aspects such as engine health which we'll cover in the next module. |
00:48 | For example here we can use a channel report to show us instantly what our minimum oil pressure was even during a full race. |
00:56 | Scrolling through time/distance plots for each lap of a long race, to find where your minimum oil pressure was is going to be time consuming at best. |
01:04 | And it's also easy to actually miss a key segment of data when doing this. |
01:08 | Using a channel report we can instead analyse the full race in a single report and instantly see which lap saw our minimum and maximum values. |
01:18 | If this raises any concerns we can then go directly to the lap of interest and find out what the circumstances were using a time/distance plot. |
01:27 | The other advantage with a channel report is that we collate all the data we're interested in in one place. |
01:34 | This means we can scan all the channels related to something like engine health in a few instances and decide if there's anything to be concerned about. |
01:42 | Time is almost always a precious commodity at the racetrack and a channel report can be a useful tool to cut down on our analysis time. |
01:51 | We do need to be mindful of the limitations of what a channel report can show us though. |
01:55 | For example if we're using a channel report to analyse engine temperatures then we can easily end up being mislead by a channel report showing us a peak value that's occurred as a result of a pitstop when the car has been stationary with no airflow for some period of time. |
02:11 | Without getting more complex, this is somewhat unavoidable and really what we're most interested in is what the maximum temperature was under race conditions on track. |