Professional Motorsport Data Analysis: Step 1: Initial Configuration

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Step 1: Initial Configuration

1.17.46

00:00	- Step 1 is the configuration of the logging system.
00:03	Now this really is one of the most critical steps when it comes to data logging.
00:07	If you don't get this right you're either going to record the wrong data or maybe no data at all and that means obviously from a data analysis perspective, there's nothing to analyse so that's a really really important step to make sure you've got everything configured as well as possible from the start.
00:23	Now there's no doubt that as you move on through, whether it's the season or through different cars in different logging systems, you'll always be modifying your logging configuration, you'll be changing the amount of things you're logging, changing maybe the rates that you're logging them at, stuff like that but you really need to take the time to set things up calmly, in a nice calm environment, you certainly don't want to be doing this from the time when you unload the car at the racetrack from the first time you're going to run with your logger.
00:48	You really need to spend the time in your home workshop to go through and set this properly in a calm environment where you've got no time pressure because it can be quite a detailed job and as you'll see when we go through all of the settings in this particular MoTeC system, you can see how time consuming it can be to set everything up properly.
01:05	As I went through in the introduction, this particular logging system we're using here is a combined MoTeC dash logger.
01:11	Most of the data it's getting is via the CAN bus system which is coming both from the factory sensors, things like the brake pressure and the steering position but also a lot of it is coming via the MoTeC M150 ECU that we've got fitted to this car as well.
01:25	Another external sensor of note is the GPS sensor which is giving us lots of information about where we are on the track and how fast we're going, you can even get some lateral and longitudinal acceleration channels from that GPS sensor if needed.
01:39	As I talked about in the intro, one of the main advantages with using a dash logger is that everything is combined in one unit, that means you've got less equipment to mount and to power and all that sort of stuff, so having everything combined in a dash logger means obviously we can get lots of information to the driver in real time and not have to transmit that data, things like the time delta or the gain/loss to separate a screen or anything like that, this is all built in one unit so it really just does take care of a little bit of complexity for you.
02:07	So the first thing we need to do is to find a way to communicate with the logger so we can set everything up from the start.
02:13	So for MoTeC, that means usually connecting to the logger with an ethernet or a network cable and in my particular situation my computer doesn't have an ethernet port so I've got an adaptor going from ethernet into USB.
02:26	So this is what I've got here, for my particular case we've got the ethernet port running to the logger itself and then I've got my little USB dongle which I'm just going to connect into the USB port here on my computer and now we can connect to the logger.
02:40	Now every one of the different loggers that you get from MoTeC is going to have a different configuration tool that comes with it.
02:46	All I mean by that is a different piece of specific software that's designed to communicate and configure that particular logger.
02:52	It's really important that you make sure you're using the correct configuration tool for your particular logger.
02:57	In all likelihood if you're trying to use the wrong tool, it simply just won't connect to the logger itself.
03:02	It's really easy to find those from the downloads section of the MoTeC website and they're all free to download.
03:07	So if we just come across to my laptop screen here we can see we've got the software for the CDL3 MoTeC unit already open so this just gives you a little bit of a preview also of what the dash unit that I'm using actually looks like in the car.
03:20	So I'll take you guys through a couple of the different features of the software that we've got here, the first thing I'm going to do is actually download the configuration that's currently on the logger and that's what we're going to work with.
03:31	So before I get into explaining everything, I'm just going to come to this little button up here which has got this little green arrow with a down arrow, so that's indicating that's going to download the configuration from the logger to my PC.
03:44	So you can see here it'll give me a little get configuration prompt as well.
03:48	So now that I've clicked on that get configuration button you can see that it's telling me that this is the name here of the current configuration that's stored in the logger and it's saying it's exactly the same as what is currently stored on my PC so that means it's telling me that this configuration was sent from this PC, my PC was the last one to send a configuration to this logger.
04:11	The concept of a configuration's really important to understand and every logger will deal with it a bit differently but essentially it means all of the settings that we use in the software that we send to the logger can be stored in a single file and hte idea there is that it means we can save and download and upload this single file to send all the configuration at once, it's not a case of changing each setting individually so in some cases you might want to share that configuration between different loggers or in our case what we're typically doing is evolving that logging configuration over time so that means I'll typically give the logger configuration a pretty descriptive name so in this case you'll see on the screen I've got it called RaceCraft GT86 and then I've got the date that I sent that configuration and then at the end I've just got a little bit of information about what I was doing when I sent that last configuration.
04:58	So in this particular car we've got a MoTeC V2 camera which is just an external camera and the idea behind connecting the logger and the camera together is the logger can send a sync signal to the camera to tell it when to start recording, when to stop recording and also that's allowing, that's nesting the information so that the video and the log data can be automatically synchronised together in one go.
05:20	So the last time I was configuring this particular logger it was getting the V2 camera and the logger talking to each other properly and I was uploading an extra CAN template just to give us a few more diagnostic channels when it came to diagnosing an issue we had with that particular camera when I originally fitted it.
05:38	So that's what's going on there so I'm just going to press OK.
05:41	And now the first thing it'll do is ask me to update the current details so the idea here is that as well as the configuration file you've constantly got the logging directory and the information about where you are, stored in the logger as well.
05:56	So the idea here is every time I press download log file, it's going to name the log file appropriately and it's going to save it in the correct location so you can see here that I've got the current venue stored as workshop.
06:11	So this is what I tend to do whenever I'm playing around and downloading data and stuff in the workshop, I tend to make sort of fake venue as workshop, it just allows me to store all of my data, all the testing, all the data I've got in the workshop in the workshop folder, rather than just miscellaneously assigning it to the maybe the previous or the next racetrack I'm going to, I just find it's a little bit cleaner.
06:31	So that's, I'm just going to leave that set as default by that.
06:35	Now the first thing I'm going to do is go through and make a new configuration for this worked example so that any changes we me to it are going to be stored within the new configuration not the old configuration so all I'm going to do up here for a start, go file, save as, so this is saving the configuration file so I'm just going to come back here and rename this, so let's have a look, the date today is the 12th of April 21 and I'm just going to say this is the pro data course MoTeC worked example.
07:19	So now everything that we change in this configuration is going to be stored within this file.
07:25	So straight away I'll go through all the different options we have here just before we get too much further and you'll see as we go through these options how all of these configurations work.
07:35	So along the top it looks really familiar, it's got a Windows style layout of all the different options.
07:42	Here we've got options to make a new configuration, open an old configuration save or save as so if I wanted to, you'll be using save as quite a lot, so you'll be taking the current but you'll save as a new name and you'll want to evolve it into a different configuration so that's what all of these options up here are.
08:00	We've got the option to edit the details.
08:02	So this is, you won't typically be getting to the edit details section through this screen we'll be doing through it a little bit later when we actually do the download but essentially this is the same screen that you'll see every time you do a download from the logger.
08:15	So the idea here is that we can rename the event, the session and in this case I use a sequential download number, so this, when it has DL3, what I mean by that is download 3 so every time I do a download, I'll increment it, so DL3, DL4, DL5, DL6 throughout the day.
08:32	So that just gives me a way to keep track of which download happened at which time and typically I do a download for every time the car comes into the pit lane.
08:42	So each time the car leaves the pit lane and comes back in, that's one download.
08:45	That allows me to keep all my data segmented by how many runs we did on track which again is just a way of making it line up with any notes you're taking as well.
08:54	So then I've got a place down here for a long comment which is just maybe a little bit of information about that run, again just to give you a little bit more context when you're going back and reviewing that data afterwards.
09:04	We've also got the ability here to put in the venue that we're at.
09:09	So obviously I said we're in the workshop right now but if I was at a particular racetrack I could put that here and when we go into one of these we've got the ability to define a little bit of information about it which is really important.
09:20	So the configuration of the track, you can put the length in here which is used by later on in the i2 software that we might get into discussing later.
09:28	We've got the ability to put the GPS coordinates of the start/finish line.
09:32	Obviously I'm not doing any laps here in the workshop so I don't need to put those here but you can add the start/finish line GPS.
09:38	So in this particular car we are using GPS beacon to record the lap time so what I mean by that, we don't have a physical beacon on the side of the track, we use the GPS position data and a virtual start/finish line to generate all of our laps and this is where you'd put that information in here.
09:54	We've got a way of putting a nominal best lap time in here and as well as how many laps per tank which we'll see later in the configuration how that information is used.
10:04	I've also got the logging directory which is really important to get right.
10:08	So as we went through in the course, I'm generally storing all my logged data with the highest hierarchy being the location or the track you're at, then followed by the season and then within that season I've got something that's defining each event.
10:20	So whether you've got multiple test sessions at that track, throughout that season or multiple race events or maybe you've only got one race event at each of the tracks, whatever it is, that's the hierarchy, how I break it down.
10:30	We've also got the ability to add some comments here about the venue if we wanted to add anything in there.
10:36	So that is what, that's what everything that's involved in the details editor.
10:41	I should also say we've got the ability to manage the vehicles in here.
10:45	So this is where we've got, we can manage some information about the car name, about the dash serial number that we're using, we've got a bit of a description of the car.
10:57	There's lots of different options to put different information here and there's lot of different uses inside the software that we'll get into later on for using all of these but we're using, it's a pretty basic setup we've got here.
11:08	And then we've got the options for different drivers as well.
11:11	So these are the options that the software will give you when you download the data.
11:15	You can sort of select from a drop down of which driver was in the car for which run.
11:17	So that is it for the details editor, back into the file here.
11:24	We've got some other options, I won't go through these, we won't go through the check channels, we'll access them in a separate part.
11:30	We can view a configuration, a summary of the configuration here.
11:35	So this is just every channel it's generated, it's giving you some information of where it's coming from so we can see in particular here this airbox temperature is coming from the CAN bus, coming from, it tells is the place it's getting it from on the CAN bus and it's coming from the M1 ECU in this case and we can see everywhere this channel is being used by the logger.
11:55	So it can be a really useful way to summarise your configuration.
12:01	Then down here we've got the previous configurations that we ran in this particular PC, ones that we've interacted with before either pulling them from the car and saving them, it's just a quick access to finding them from here if we need them, the last 10 configurations that we have listed.
12:24	OK if we go to the connections tab and devices, so this is a bit of a summary here, we see we've got 3 tabs, we've got inputs pins, output pins and internal pins so this is just giving us a little bit of information about how the logger is wired and what's happening on each one of those channels.
12:42	So you can see here in the top 4 we've got 4 analog voltage inputs.
12:46	In this particular car, doesn't have damper potentiometers fitted to it at the moment but it has had some in the past and that's what these configurations are here so if I just double click on here you can see it's got some information where we are mapping the voltage to the position.
13:03	So this is just a completely linear interpolation between voltage and position in this case.
13:08	We've got different options to choose whether it's absolute voltage ratio metric, variable resistance depending on the type of damper that you're using.
13:16	But essentially this is a way for us to go through and map a voltage to a position, that's what this particular channel is being used for but that can be used for any analog sensor, any analog voltage input, it can be generically applicable regardless of what type of sensor you're using.
13:32	So we've got 2 damper potentiometers, even though we're not actually using them on this car, configured on the first 2 analog pins, there's nothing on the next 2 analog pins.
13:40	Then we've got a couple of other pins here that are set up with different calibrations, so these are just, this particular one here is an on or an off so an inactive and an active voltage range.
13:56	Then we've got another one that's used for taking the original fuel tank level signal.
14:01	So this has got an original style fuel tank in it so it's got a normal fuel sensor that you'd find in most road cars and here we've got another example of mapping a value to a physically, sorry mapping an electrical value to a physical value.
14:17	So here we've got a resistance, we've got a table of ohms, of resistance vs how much fuel is left in the tank and that's what we see a visual representation here in this plot here that's shown in the table.
14:30	So you can see here it's been named which is always good practice to name the configuration.
14:35	Usually when I, sorry name the calibration, when I go through and do a calibration, I try put as much information as possible in there so that's things like the sensor that we're using, the date, anything else that's going to be relevant and that's going to help me later on when I'm going back and trying to figure out what that configuration was, when it was done, how it was done, stuff like that.
14:52	So you can see that's another example of a calibration.
14:55	Then we've got some digital input pins here where we've got a next, this is a mapping an external button that we're using to loop through different displays that we've got in the dash logger that we've got here and we've also got some different inputs configured here, in this case that I'd be using, are used to map the indicators to the logger so that we can log and understand what's going on with those and you could potentially use those inputs for other things inside your logger, depending on which logic you want to make use of, there's a lot.
15:26	Now if we go across to the output pins, we've got 4 output pins configured here and in this case we've got one that's configured to work with a beacon.
15:35	So we've got different, different ways we can configure these output pins.
15:40	So in this case, it's an on/off, so a 1 or a 0, like a boolean type operator.
15:46	We also can go with light control, duty cycle control, frequency control, more complicated duty cycle and frequency control, we can use it for video sync or for time events, there's lots of different ways we can use the output pins for there but in this car we've just got it configured for use with a beacon.
16:04	Then we've got some internal pints here which are set up by default, we've got the 5 and 8 volt supplies, the battery voltage supplied to it, internal temperature and also some G force readings as well.
16:21	So this is pretty typical, what you'll find in a lot of dash loggers where you'll have a built in accelerometer inside the dash unit itself and this is described by MoTeC as an internal pin so that's just giving you lateral, longitudinal and vertical acceleration logged from the perspective of the dash itself.
16:39	So the next thing to have a look at is the communications.
16:41	So this is where we've got any communication type that we've got with the logger.
16:45	So this is things like CAN bus or RS2232 like we've got here.
16:49	So we can see the bulk of the communication is happening through, there's 2 separate CAN buses here, through CAN 0 and we've got, this is M1, this is coming from the ECU, all these M1 channels that we've got GPS information coming through here, we've got the interface with the factory steering wheel angle so this is actually an interesting thing on this particular car that we're taking the factory steering wheel angle sensor which is part of the basic vehicle stability and ABS system that runs on this can anyway and we're making use of that built in sensor, it's something we can log and use from a data analysis perspective which is a great way of doing it.
17:27	We've also got the factory Toyota GT86 brake pressure sensor and it's something that we'll see when we go through the logged data but this particular brake pressure signal isn't actually a real pressure value, it's just an arbitrary number but it does give you a relative reading of the actual pressure that's being used at one point in the track relative to the other so it's just not giving us a real pressure number but it is giving us a scaled pressure number that we can use for analysis but we'll get into that a little bit later.
17:54	Then we've got some of the factory chassis systems here with headlights and looks like doors, the door signals, whether they're open or not.
18:05	We've got some individual cylinder lambda interface here that's happening on the CAN bus as well.
18:11	We've also got an interface with the factory vehicle stability control unit and we've also got these templates that they use to interface with that MoTeC V2 camera that I talked about earlier in the worked example as well so we've got this external camera that's pointing up the front of the car that's designed to work together with this MoTeC system to give us nested video and data to work together at the same time.
18:35	Then over on the next CAN bus we've got some lambda interfaces.
18:40	So again we've got individual cylinder lambda, one for each of the 4 cylinders that we've got in this car configured here.
18:48	We've got an RS232 optional connection as well which in this case is set up to work with a GPS sensor.
18:57	So you can see whenever we've got something highlighted here in this column it shows us all of the received channels that are coming from that device which we've got already set up here and you've also got the option to do a video sync which is, this is the signal that's being sent by the logger to the camera to tell it to start recording.
19:13	So the idea here and we'll go through it a little bit, in a little bit more detail with the logger itself but the idea here is that as soon as the logger starts recording, it's got a start and stop condition that we'll go through, the idea is that the video camera will get the exact same signal so both of those line up perfectly with each other.
19:30	And here this is just defining which CAN bus that video signal is going to be set up and obviously we've got the camera connected to CAN bus 0 here in this case so we've got CAN bus 0 selected there.
19:41	So the next section which is quite a lot of the meat of actually setting up a logger is the calculation section.
19:46	So if we come across here we've got the lap time and number.
19:49	So this is the fundamentals of how the laps are going to be defined, how they're going to be timed and how they're going to be incremented as well.
19:57	So we've got the first tab here is beacon so we've obviously got our GPS beacon selected.
20:02	So there's lots of different beacon options you could use, whether you use a MoTeC beacon or whether you use another supplier's beacon, this is where you'd come and configure that, you're going to tell the dash what it's going to listen to, which signal it's going to listen to to understand whether a beacon has been reached.
20:19	We've got a detection radius which is something we went through in the course which is determining how wide of a radius around that single point that we're defining for the start/finish line, how wide around that we can consider the car to have cross the start/finish line, so obviously it's important if you've got another section fo track that comes quite close to the finish line, we want to make it wide enough that it's going to capture all of the start/finish crossings regardless of your position on track but we don't want to make it so wide that it's picking up, going on some other part of the track as well, so 10 m is what we've got selected here.
20:51	We've got the trigger, so in this case it's going to be done by coordinate which is what we want, this is where we can come and edit those latitude and longitude coordinates, obviously if we were going to a real racetrack, there'd be something selected here but in the workshop I've got nothing selected but you get the idea and that's something we went through in quite a lot of detail inside the actual course itself.
21:09	You could also map it to a push button which isn't something I'd personally ever use but theoretically you could distinguish the laps which may or may not be used for actual laps depending on what sort of data recording you're using but the idea is you can map it to some sort of external output that in this case you could map to a channel or an input, might be an input pin or something like that.
21:27	We've also got an ignore time value.
21:29	So that's important to understand, it's saying any, in this case it's got 10 or 10 seconds so that means that any beacons within 10 seconds of the original beacon will be ignored.
21:37	So sometimes that ignore time is a useful value to go through and use if you're having problems with fake beacons coming up.
21:43	So you can say maybe if you've got someone else using the same beacon frequency as you, which is something you always want to avoid but if that happened you could put an ignore time in there to ignore any subsequent beacons after your beacon.
21:54	Obviously it's going to take the first beacon it sees, the first valid beacon but it's going to say in this particular case for a GPS beacon, it's going to ignore any beacons within 10 seconds of the first beacon.
22:05	Here we've got, these are some standard channels that'll be set up for you already by MoTeC but the idea here is that any of these boxes that are ticked are channels that will be logged by the logger and used, so by default you're almost always going to want to have the lap time and the running lap time and this is just simply the logged channel that's going to be sent out as a result.
22:28	So in this case, again it's just giving us the summary of where these channels are used which is going to be pretty typical for all of these configurations that we go through so again, these are set up by default.
22:40	You've also got the option to set up here a reset condition which you can do it by comparison channel or you've got some different logic here and we'll go through some of that logic a little bit later in a configuration where we're going to use it in a bit more of a sensible way.
22:56	We've got the option to use split time, so we're not going to set up split times, it's not something I typically set up inside the logger as I use split times, I usually do that more on the data analysis project so the idea there is that it gives me a little bit more flexibility to define my own splits by the car position so it's not something I usually set up inside the logger but you've got the option there to do it.
23:17	So we've got the lap counter which is obviously how many, it's counting how many laps we're doing so it's incrementing up.
23:24	So it's going to generate a channel called lap number for us.
23:27	We've got the option to define the count up or the count down.
23:30	The preset value which is the value it'll start with when it starts logging which it'll start on lap 0 and obviously you have to finish that lap 0 before the first real lap will be started.
23:38	Got some options here to increment the lap number on the first beacon and then at the bottom here we've got an option to set the lap counter to one if any of the following conditions apply.
23:51	So it's basically saying here, if the GPS speed drops to 0 for more than 5 seconds, that lap counter will be reset to 1 again.
24:00	We've got lap counter 2 set up here which is just a separate lap counter, it's not something again I usually configure but you have got the option of using a whole lot of different sets of conditions to count the laps in a different way or increment those laps in a different way if you wanted to use that.
24:12	So the last tab here is the options tab and we've got the lap count hold off value, so that's just giving us the minimum time between 2 laps that must occur for the lap to be incremented so it just means in this case there's a value of 0 put in there so as soon as another lap is triggered it's going to make that lap number increment by 1 but you can put a value here to ignore, to not increment that lap time if the second lap, if the subsequent lap is within that lap time value that you've got set.
24:41	The next thing to look at in the calculations tab is the speed and distance calculations.
24:46	So the first tab here we've got is ground speed so this is one of the channels that'll be generated for us automatically in the data and we've got a couple of different methods we can calculate the ground speed, by default here we're looking at when it says left it means which wheel speed sensor, so we've got left, right.
25:05	We can take the fastest wheel speed, we can take the average of all of them or we can look at all 4 based on the APS so here in this particular case we're using GPS speed to generate the ground speed.
25:20	So that's why we've got it just looking at the left here and why, this is why the right is greyed out because we've got the option of just using the GPS speed here so it's not really the left, it's actually the GPS speed and the channel it's going to generate as a result is ground speed.
25:37	But obviously you can see how you would be going through and setting up the, depending on which one of these values you were using, you could go and assign the right channel for your situation.
25:50	The next one is drive speed.
25:52	So we've got, again we're looking at that left channel, so as you guessed it, we're using GPS speed again.
25:57	So it's just going to take the GPS speed channel and it's going to make a duplicate of it essentially and it's going to be naming it as drive speed.
26:03	Now in the case, if this was going to be, I guess set up differently, you could take one of the wheel speed channels that's coming from the ECU and you could map both the left and the right in this case, so it would be left rear and right rear because it's a rear wheel drive and then that would be giving you a drive speed calculation based on that.
26:25	I'm not using that particular method here, I do all of my own drive calculations in the i2 analysis software instead of doing it inside the logger.
26:33	Here we've got an option to do a slip calculation and that's going to be giving us an option to, if I select that there, that's going to be giving us an estimation of how much drive slip is occurring on the driven wheels.
26:47	So for this case we're not using it again and again because I've got all of the wheel speed channels logged individually which we'll go through later.
26:56	I'm able to post process that and do my own calculation, in whichever way I want so I'm not using any of the built in slip calculations here although we do have the option to compute it either as a speed difference or as either a percentage difference here.
27:10	Lap distance is obviously another automatically generated channel for us because it's ticked here that it's going to generate a channel as lap distance, it's going to be logged for us, we've got some options to do some reset conditions and also what happens if you miss a beacon.
27:26	What this is saying is that if it gets greater than a 10% greater lap distance, than what you've got defined for the actual lap distance, that's controlling the behaviour of how you're going to miss the beacon, cutting off that lap to start a new one.
27:42	So that's what's going on there, we've got trip distance which we're not using but this is a similar function to what you can imagine you'd have on your OEM road car where you've got obviously an odometer that's counting the whole time but you've got a trip distance which you can reset manually on the dash.
27:57	So we're not using that particular, we don't have an application for that, we're not using it but you do have that option there.
28:03	And obviously there's an odometer tab which is counting the entire distance that's being travelled by the car since this logger has been fitted to it so that's a constantly accumulating number so we have got that channel generating there.
28:15	Back in the calculations tab we have lap gain and loss so obviously this is something we're going to be making a lot of use of, this is what we talked about in the course with lap gain/loss or delta T, delta time.
28:25	It's going to be a different term depending on the analysis system, the logger system that you're using for your car but this is essentially giving us, using a distance calculation to tell you how far ahead or behind you are relative to the reference lap so we've got these automatic channels here which we've got a lap gain/loss running which is just the current gain or loss relative to the reference lap that you've got at this point on track.
28:53	We've got a predicted lap time which is based on how far ahead you are within your current lap or where you are relative to your reference lap and then it assumes you're going to match the rest of the time of the reference lap to the rest of the lap.
29:05	So let's say you've got 2 sectors, in the first sector it's going to be taking your current time plus the time it predicts it's going to take you to get to the end of the next sector, then for that last sector it's going to use that second sector from the predicted lap, it's going to assume you're going to match that and that's the calculation it's doing in the background and then we've also got the reference lap time here which is what we're going to use when we're going to upload that to the car which I'll go through a little bit later of doing an example of how we're going to upload a reference lap to the dash.
29:38	We've got the input channels for these, obviously the lap distance and the running lap time which we talked about before.
29:45	Now we've got the option here in the output polarity to, really it's just a convention of where the, if you're ahead or if you're making a positive, the current lap you're doing it better than the reference lap, whether that's going to be shown in the negative or a positive number.
29:58	We've got here showing as a negative number which is the convention I'm used to but you've got the option to use either there.
30:03	And then this is quite an important setting down here for the reference lap update.
30:05	This is where you're going to define the behaviour of how the logger treats a faster lap.
30:11	So what that means is you upload a reference lap to the dash or the logger and then this is going to define whether if you set a faster lap than the reference, whether it's going to take that faster lap and overwrite the previous reference lap time or whether it's going to always keep the manually set lap time.
30:28	So depending on what you want, you may want to keep the original lap always or you may want to get it to update, you've got the option to choose either there.
30:36	You've also got the option here to define a button that can clear the reference lap.
30:42	So the idea there is that sometimes people want the ability to do that either somewhere maybe on the dashboard, or somewhere on the steering wheel, they want the ability to be able to clear that reference lap.
30:50	You can do that without having to plug into the logger with your computer, you can just map that to a button or any other input that you want.
30:57	The next thing that we're going to look at here is the gear detection.
31:00	So the method we're using in this car is an automatic gear detection based on the relationship between the road speed and the engine speed.
31:06	So because this car has a factory transmission, there is no output available from the transmission to directly tell us which gear we're in.
31:14	If we were using something like a sequential gearbox, that would have a sensor where it would be, you'd have a sensor mapped to the selector drum so you would be able to directly measure which gear you're in.
31:25	In this case because we don't have that, which is the case for a lot of road car style transmissions, that means that we'll have to do a calculation, that's what's going on here in this section so here we've got the ability to turn that off to run a sensor which is this style I was talking about, if you had something like a sequential transmission or we've got here the calculation between speed and RPM which is what we're using.
31:45	So this is the channel that's going to output gear which is a default channel so that's the it's going to give us our log channel of, so that we can record what gear we were in at which point on track.
31:57	There's an acceptance delay here which is just defining how long until that value gets updated when there's a new calculation made.
32:07	And here we've got the channels that we're going to use for the calculation so we're going to use in this case the rear left wheel speed and we've got an engine RPM channel here which is our engine speed which is coming over the CAN bus from the ECU.
32:21	Then down here, importantly we've got this table of km/h per 1000 RPM and basically we're giving it a value of each one of those for each gear.
32:31	So you're just going to input that value which is a pretty simple calculation to do for each gear and when the ECU, sorry the logger's going to look at each one of those and decide which one of those you're closest to and that's going to define which gear you're in based on that calculation.
32:45	Obviously there's a little bit of slop in there depending on tyre pressures, all that stuff, obviously if you changed your wheel or tyre size, that calculation's going to be different as well so you do need to be able to update that.
32:59	The next table we're going to go to here is fuel prediction.
33:02	So this isn't actually something we've got much set up in this car but this is, the idea here is that you can be doing a fuel calculation in the background, calculating, if you're taking some information from your ECU, you can be calculating how much fuel you're using at each point.
33:16	So it is an estimation but it is something that can be really really accurate.
33:19	The idea here is that we can be calculating in the background how much fuel is being consumed by the car at each point so it's not a direct measurement of how much fuel's in the tank, it's a calculation of how much fuel is being consumed by the engine instantaneously and it's a fuel number that'll increment over time.
33:31	So we're not actually using that in the logger, that's something that we calculate directly in the ECU so we can log that from the ECU instead of having to do that calculation a second time.
33:41	But in saying that, this is something maybe you want to set up if you don't have access to your ECU's fuel calculation or you're using an original ECU, sorry an OEM ECU that doesn't have the ability to calculate that fuel consumption for you.
33:55	Again we've got these fuel consumption numbers here, fuel used, fuel usage, fuel used per lap, total fuel used.
34:02	These are the channels that you can generate if you're doing your fuel calculation inside your logger which we are not.
34:09	We've got this fuel remaining channel which is in this case mapped to our fuel level sensor.
34:14	So this is the sensor that we went through, one of the input pins that we looked at earlier in the example.
34:20	So we're actually taking the reading of the factory style fuel level sensor and we're mapping this to a channel called fuel remaining.
34:27	You've got to understand this isn't going to be a particularly accurate channel, it's something that's going to be most accurate when the car's sitting there on a level surface not running, when the car's actually moving on track, this value will be jumping around all over the place and you have to do so much filtering, it's probably not actually going to be very useful at all but it's just a value that if nothing else, we can chuck up on the dashboard for the driver just to give us an understanding of where the factory fuel sender is sitting at any point in time.
34:51	We've got an option here to do laps remaining so this is where that value that we went through earlier in the example where we could say how many laps per tank you'd get at each track.
35:00	This is where we can generate those values for laps remaining based on that value of how big your fuel tank is and how many laps you can get per tank, these are channels we can be generating automatically inside the logger just to give you kind of a backup value inside the car of how far you've got to go, assuming that you started that run with a full tank.
35:22	And then we've got also options to save.
35:25	The next thing we want to look at is, got speed min and max so this is just some really basic logging that the logger's going to do for us where it's going to generate a channel for the minimum corner speed and the maximum straight speed for every log file that we've got.
35:43	It's going to use, here we've got the ability to map that to any speed channel we want and in this case we've mapped it to the GPS speed channel and we've got the hysteresis on the minimum and the hysteresis on the maximum.
35:55	The hysteresis is obviously that band that it has to exceed before it's going to update.
35:59	We've got the ability also to define some tables here so there's lots of different uses you could use tables for.
36:06	The idea here is that you can map one input to a different output.
36:10	So we've got the ability to do 2D or 3D tables.
36:13	We don't actually use any 2D tables in this logger but we are using 3D tables.
36:17	Here you can see we've got 4 different lambda values so what's going on here, we've got exhaust pressure compensated lambda sensors so because this is a turbocharged engine, there'll be quite a lot of pressure inside the exhaust manifold.
36:29	We've got individual lambda sensors fitted to each one of the runners on the exhaust manifold and we need to correct each one of those lambda readings for the pressure that's in the exhaust manifold so that's what is going on here.
36:41	So if I double click on here, you can see we've got the 2 axes here so on the X axis we've got the exhaust pressure channel and we're mapping these numbers here to the exhaust pressure and on the Y axis, we've got these same values that we're mapping to lambda values as well.
36:59	Then we've got the channel that it's going to output which is lambda 1 and then this is giving us the table of which you're going to get a linear interpolation between these 2 values of lambda across these different pressure ranges.
37:14	So that's an example of how you can make use of a table, obviously there's lots of different applications, we actually go through an example in the data fundamentals course where I use the table to map the steering position using a table in the logger to make an output for the steering angle position.
37:32	The next part of the calculations is looking at the user conditions so user condition is something where you can give the logger for the inputs it's got, you can say for different things it's true so you could say something like if this value is greater than this, then do this.
37:48	Or if you could say if both of these values are greater than this, do this or you could say if a value is greater than this for a certain amount of time then do this.
37:54	So let's have a look at a couple of examples, so we've got when the dash is going to be selected into race mode and we'll go through what that means in a minute but basically it means you can flick between different screens in the logger that are pre defined.
38:05	Now at the top here we've got whether the condition is momentary or activate and deactivate so momentary, that means that that condition is only true when that condition is true.
38:15	Or activate/deactivate, you can think of it as a latching.
38:17	So if something's true it gets latched on, then it has to be turned on again, sorry it has to be turned off again manually so it latched on and latches off whereas momentary is only true when that condition is true.
38:28	You can kind of think of it as having to hold a push button down and it's only true when the button's on or you can think of it as the latching where you click it on, it latches on and it doesn't turn off again until you activate that input again.
38:39	So in this case, this is a really simple condition it's just saying we've got, if I click on it here, it's just saying the comparison is display next line, that's the channel.
38:51	It says if it's true for 1 second, then that's when it's going to activate that output.
38:57	But you can see we've got the option to put, do a comparison to say less than, is updated, greater than, equal to, whatever it is, depending on what you want to use, it's a pretty flexible output.
39:08	So let's have a look at the low fuel user condition, let's see what that says.
39:12	So again this is a momentary type so it's only going to be active when this condition is met so this is saying when fuel remaining, so that's the channel that is mapped to the fuel level sensor in the tank, when fuel remaining is less than or equal to 6 litres for 30 seconds, it's going to give us a low fuel output.
39:31	So this user condition, let's have a look at what it says.
39:34	Again you can see here we're using fuel remaining as a channel and the condition the comparison that we're using is less than or equal to.
39:43	The value is 6, so we've got a hard coded 6 litres in here.
39:48	So this is saying when the fuel remaining is less than or equal to 6 litres for 30 seconds, so that's just giving us that time window, it's looking at it over, it's going to output low fuel which is this value down here.
40:00	So that gives you an idea of how we can use user conditions, they're super flexible, you can do all sorts of things with them and depending on the logger, depending on the model and the brand of the logger, you can have lots of different options of how to use that as well.
40:14	We've got bit combines here, we're not actually using bit combines in this particular car but the idea behind a bit combine is that you can combine a whole lot of different bit channels into a single channel and that just simplifies or can simplify your logging and sending parameter setup.
40:29	So what I mean by that is a bit is where you've got a channel which can have only 2 states, either an on or an off.
40:35	So a 1 or a 0, there's not, we're not talking about having a whole span of ranges for a channel, let's say something like a temperature channel would have an analog output where you've got a whole lot of different options it can be between, say 0 and 100° and anything in between.
40:49	In the case of a bit, it's just going to be on or off so that can be used for something like headlights are on or off, anything that's just a 1 or a 0.
40:56	So the idea here is that rather than sending a whole lot of bit channels, so let's say I've got things for indicators, I've got things for lights, I've got things for brake lights, all of these can either be on or off, there's no variability in between them.
41:08	I could combine all of those into one channel and assign each one of those bits to a different part of that channel and let's say I wanted to map all of those bit channels which is going to be headlights, high beam, low beam, indicators, brake lights, I could combine them all into one channel and each one of those bits would have a different value associated with it and I'd be able to just send one channel over as a log channel and then I can then use that channel however I want when I'm post processing or use it to send it to another part of the car that's listening over the CAN bus or however it is, it gives me an ability just to basically compress all of these bit channels into a reduced number of channels to make it a bit cleaner to manage.
41:46	OK the next part we're going to get into is the functions tab here.
41:49	So if we click on the functions we can see straight away we've got the first one is logging so let's click on that, see what's going on there.
41:56	So this is really important to understand, this is where we define all of the channels that are actually going to be logged into the memory of a logger.
42:03	So here is where we just say, which just because we've got a whole lot of channels defined in the logger, it doesn't mean they're going to be logged unless we tell the logger to actually record them.
42:11	So we tell it which channels we want to log and at which frequency we want to log them.
42:17	So in here, I scan down through this list, these are all the different channels we're logging, so you can see there's a lot of different channels here, let's just go find, let's find one that we're, an obvious one here so I've just clicked on throttle position and here it brings up an option to log at certain frequencies, so depending on the frequency you want to log at, you can select that.
42:37	And obviously you've got to go through and manually define that for every single channel we're logging on here.
42:44	So it is quite a time consuming process but generally it's only something you're doing once until it gets to a point where you say that you might want to increase the rate you're logging a certain value at.
42:55	You might want to decrease it to increase your logging space, you might add a new sensor to the car, this is where you'd be adding it into your log list and choosing the logging frequency you want to use.
43:06	There's a couple of really important, witih this particular setting down here I want to talk about, cycle through available logging memory, what that means is if you end up filling your entire logging memory up, that defines whether the logger becomes full and just stops recording, or whether it cycles back to the start and starts to overwrite the old logged data and keep the most recent logged data.
43:25	So that is a really important behaviour to understand depending on how you want to set up your logging.
43:31	The other thing down here is this time available to log and time available so this is the calculation that'll update every time you change a value in here.
43:39	The idea here is it's telling you is if the logging memory was entirely clear, that's how much logging or how much log time you've got available for the current log configuration.
43:50	So depending on how many channels you're going to log and at what frequency you're going to log them, that value's going to update.
43:55	So depending on the type of racing you're doing, the format of racing you're doing, whether you're doing really short races, whether you're doing really really long races, even like a 24 hour race, if it's important for you to gather all of that data within that 24 hour race, or at the other end of the spectrum, I've certainly seen lots of loggers where you've got, even though you've got quite a lot of logging memory if you're logging things at really high frequency, let's say you've got things like laser ride height and damper potentiometers slip angle sensors, stuff like this, really complicated logging setups where you've got really high frequencies that are being logged at.
44:27	Even with a lot of logging memory you may be down into the, well under an hour of actual log time.
44:33	So depending on what you're logging and how long you're going to be logging for and how often you're going to be downloading those log files, it's really important to make sure that you've got enough logging time available in your logging setup.
44:44	The next tab here is the start/stop condition so that's really important to understand as well 'cause this is going to define when the logger starts and stops.
44:51	So obviously if this isn't set up properly, your logger may not ever start recording or at the other end of the spectrum it may never stop recording as well.
45:00	What I mean by that is once it's on it may stay on and it's going to record a whole lot of garbage in between so you want to make sure you're capturing the logged data that actually makes sense to you, that you're interested in.
45:09	And most of the time, that's as simple as it's going to be is when the car's moving is you want to record, you want to be recording all of the data.
45:17	So it's a really simple condition here and you can see we've got lots of different options to put lots of different conditions here so it doesn't have to be just one set of conditions, it can be this or this or this or this.
45:25	In this particular case it's just saying, when the engine speed is greater than or equal to 2000 RPM, so we'll go here and have a look, looks really similar to what we saw in the user conditions before.
45:35	Engine speed greater than or equal to 2000 RPM.
45:38	Then this value of, it will start logging, and then the stop condition here is engine speed equal to 0 for 10 seconds so means the engine speed needs to be 0 for 10 seconds or greater, it will stop logging.
45:55	So that's the condition we've got set up there, so that looks good to go.
45:57	We've got some status channels which sort of are more diagnostic channels that will be going on in the background so we've got log time remaining, log data available, log unloading, so that's just whether the logger is being downloaded at that time, whether it's running, if the logging memory's busy, the CPU usage which is the CPU of the logger, and the device up time.
46:19	Again more so diagnostic channels that we're not going to need a whole lot of and then we've got the base logging rate set there as once per second as well.
46:25	The next thing we're going to set up is the display so this is everything that's going to be actually shown to the driver in front of us so this is, this section that we can see in the middle of the configuration tool, that's roughly, that's one particular, one chosen layout that the manufacturer has chosen to show us, that's kind of what, that's the part I'm talking about.
46:43	So we've got a whole lot of different pages up here.
46:45	So we've got race, practice, warm up, so the idea here is that you can have a whole lot of predefined views you can cycle through manually so those can be cycled through manually or they can be triggered automatically from a condition, so whether it's a user condition or some math.
46:59	The idea there is that you may want to look at different pages at different times and you can manually select them or have some sort of logic to define when each page is going to be shown.
47:10	But let's go through from the top here, so we're in the race page.
47:14	So we've got the bar graph, so you can map the bar graph to any particular output, in this case, we've got the engine speed mapped to it, so here we've got the points they're going to be mapped to, so each one of those tick points is going to be matched to a different range, so depending on the engine speed range we're using, you're going to want to update that.
47:31	You've got the option to have a shift point indicator here, we are using a external shift light module as well which we will control from inside the logger, which the idea there is that we can set, which each one of the shift points is going to be eliminated, we've got multi step shift point which we'll go through in more detail in a second.
47:50	So that's the contorl for the bar graph.
47:52	We've got essentially each one of these predefined parts here, this is, this style of dash is maybe an older style of dash where each part of the dash is sort of hard coded to be used in a particular way, more modern dashes are completely flexible, you can show or drag components around in a much more complex way but this is sort of a bit more of an old school dash where you've got each section which is kind of pre defined but you can see as I kind of go around and highlight, you can see different parts are highlighted as blue here.
48:19	So on the race page we've got the top right, that will be the fuel remaining channel, we've got the lap time will be shown in the middle, just to the right in the middle there, we've go the GPS speed which we've mapped just to the centre there, just left of centre and then the gear which will be shown in the middle here.
48:38	Then in that bottom channel in this bottom area down the bottom here, this is where we've got the option to cycle through a whole lot of options and what's actually going on here, we've got different, 3 different columns, this is one column, this is another column and this is the 3rd column so the idea here is that we can use this bottom section, it's breaking it up into 3 different pieces and the idea is that it's giving us a way to look at 3 different pieces of information simultaneously so in this top line here, the idea here, each one of these rows is that you can press a button to cycle through each one of those rows depending on what you're interested in looking at.
49:14	So this is look at the lap gain and loss and you can see it's got for value 1, that's the left one, value 2 will be the middle, value 3 will be the right hand side of this bottom row.
49:23	We're not actually using, in that first selection we're only using the first one and it's going to show us that value of lap gain/loss that is the one we went through the setup of before which is that delta time value.
49:35	Then we've got some information about how to, the abbreviated label that we're going to give it on the dashboard here and how it's going to be shown, how many decimal places, you've just got some options on filtering and stuff like that, basically how it's going to be displayed to the driver.
49:49	As we cycle through, let's go to an option where we've got multiple ones of these shown so this is, if we scroll through to this part, so this will be pressing the, we'd be pressing the scroll button to get to the 4th menu, so 3 times.
50:03	So we would have, on the left side we would show fuel pressure and in the middle we would show oil pressure.
50:08	Again we've got the option to label those, so it'd be FP for the fuel pressure and OP for the oil pressure.
50:14	And we can map that to the format we want to show it in, what units we want to show it in and any filtering we want to add to that as well just to smooth out that signal.
50:23	So you can see as we move down here, we've got lots of different ways, lots of different pieces of information you can scroll through even on the race page by itself.
50:34	So we've got a practice page as well which again, is just another way of pre defining a whole lot of different things on the dash.
50:41	The really nice thing about having a dash like this and being able to scroll through different screens, so here we're going from race to practice to warmup.
50:47	It means that you can also access a lot of the data without even needing to plug a laptop in if you want to read a certain piece of data, having so many things configured here, whether you want to look at turbo cooling temperature, the battery voltage, the oil temperature, whatever it is, you don't actually need to get your laptop out and plug into it and download the data to look at it in real time.
51:03	You can just look at it on the dash and see what it is without having to get the laptop out which is a really nice feature.
51:10	And as you'd expect, the warmup page has got its own options as well so we've got 3 different ways of mapping to those.
51:16	Here is where we can map the, if you've got different scroll buttons or different buttons you want to use to control different functions in the dash, this is how we map them here.
51:25	So we've got a next line button, so that's the one that's going to control what's showing on that bottom row of the dashboard, how we're going to cycle through them.
51:33	And then on the output channels, the display mode, that's going to give us an output channel that's going to be available to any other device on the network, on the CAN bus so if we had a separate external display or something like that, if this was a logger that didn't have a display, we'd be able to send that update, that page update button across the CAN bus to any other device as well so that's going to show us that it's going to be called ADL display mode is the channel that's going to be available to us when that mode is changed.
52:03	We've got an option to change the back light, the amount of backlight we've got in the dash, so you can have it off, you can have it mapped to a channel, so you could have an analog input, so a knob on either the steering wheel or the dashboard or anywhere here to map that, so that could actually be adjustable but in this case, we've got it fixed at 100% brightness the entire time.
52:27	In other dashboards you've got the ability to generate display creator channels, display creator is what is used to set up the display and it's particularly something that's used in some of those more modern MoTeC displays where it's completely configurable, it's essentially, you can think of it as like a small computer screen, you can do absolutely anything with it, there's not fixed positions like we have in his particular dashboard.
52:49	But display creator is what's used to generate those generic displays and then we've got some display creator control settings here as far as mapping our page controls, display outputs, stuff like the number of pages you've got.
53:05	So that's not something we're using in this particular configuration.
53:09	OK we've got the alarms, so alarms are what, you can kind of think of them as a similar thing to user conditions but we've got them specifically set up to warn something to the driver so in this particular case, we'd be using any one of these alarms, is what would become, on that bottom line, that bottom line would become overwritten with whatever it was, so let's say you've got running lap time showing there by default, if any of these alarms become active, it's going to bring up that alarm value over top of that lap time because obviously if you've got a problem with the powertrain or problem with the car anywhere, it's more important to be able to alert the driver to that than it is to know what your current gain/loss is, you're going to be much more interested in making sure we keep the car running and don't damage anything.
53:49	So let's have a look at the engine hot alarm.
53:52	So this is the conditions we've got set up for it so actually before I just look at that, let's read through what it says here, so it says engine coolant temp greater than or equal to 112°C for 1 second and we've got a modifier of 2°.
54:09	Now let's sort of dig into exactly what that means.
54:11	I should also say before we click on it, because we've got race, practice and warmup here, essentially because all of these are ticked, that means that this alarm is going to be available to each one of those screens so remember here we sort of had 3 different modes we could click through the definition of on our display.
54:27	This is just making sure, because each one of these is active it means that these alarms are going to be available to use by each one of those displays, depending on what you're making this alarm for, you may not actually want to make it available to all the screens but in this case because it's a really important one to do with the engine health, because of the water temperature, it's something that we're going want to make available to all of them.
54:49	So if we dig into this here, we're mapping it to the engine coolant temp, that's the channel that it's going to be doing the comparison on.
54:56	It's saying here we've got the options to say greater or equal to 112°C.
55:00	Has to be greater than that for 1 second for this to become active and we've got this trigger value modifer.
55:07	So what this means is that once you've shown that value to a driver, hopefully they're going to do something about it and the reason we've got a trigger value modifier here is it's setting a value of which must be increased over for that alarm to become active a second time.
55:22	So what you typically have is an alarm come up, you've got an acknowledge button.
55:27	So in our particular case we've got an alarm acknowledge feature which is a button that's mapped to the steering wheel and that's actually defined down here under alarm acknowledge button.
55:35	So the idea here is that if an alarm comes up to the driver, they can press a button to say yes, I've seen that and the idea behind that is it's, at their discretion as to what they want to do about that, whether that means stopping the car where it is, whether that means coming into the pit lane or whether it means they think maybe if it's an erroneous error, if it's a bad sensor reading or something like that or if they decide they're going to push on regardless of what that error says or sorry regardless of what that alarm says, then they can press that button to clear that alarm.
56:02	Now after they've cleared that, what this trigger value modifier is going to say, what it means is that that value which was previously 112 is going to be incremented by 2 for the alarm to be triggered again.
56:16	So the first time it's triggered it gets triggered at 112, let's say I press acknowledge, the second time it gets triggered it's not going to be triggered until 114, I press acknowledge again, the third time it's not going to be triggered until it gets to a value of 116.
56:30	Then after that it's going to say, it's not going to be incremented anymore because we've got a maximum trigger modifier of 2 there so it's only 2 times it's going to increment before it's going to stop incrementing and at that point anything of 116°, any time it is 116° it's going to trigger that value for us again.
56:50	So that's a basic run through of how the alarms work, we've got, once that alarm is triggered, we've got some options in the messsage here to show which text will be shown to the driver over the display.
57:05	So for us that's going to say it's going to give a text value of eng hot, that's what's going to be shown to the value along the bottom part of the display there.
57:11	In addition to that it's going to give us, as well as that eng hot message it's also going to show us actually what the value of the coolant temp is next to it as well.
57:20	So the idea here is that it will show us engine coolant temp to 0 decimal places, obviously for engine temperature in celcius, we don't care about the decimal places, just 0 decimal places is perfectly fine for us.
57:33	We've got a couple of options here about acknowledging the acknowledgement behaviour as far as removing the message automatically after it's been shown for a certain amount of time.
57:43	We've got options here to activate a warning light, so if you've got an external display like in our particular case, we've got this external shift light module, it's got the option to send a message to activate a warning light and you can also send an output channel as well, you can map to a channel that you make in your logging configuration.
58:01	So you can see we've got lots of different alarms configured here, we've got the battery low, oil temperature, oil pressure, knock, overboost, really the behaviour for all of those is really similar, you can use any channel that the logger has access to to define any alarm of your choice.
58:16	OK the next thing in the functions is our shift lights.
58:18	So we've got, as I said, we've got an external shift light module on this particular dash, lots of dashes these days have shift lights built into them somewhere.
58:26	This particular one doesn't and we've got an external shift light module to do that for us.
58:30	The first thing here we get to is the method that we want to use for shifting so whether we want to use, if we didn't want to use the upshifts at all we could press, sorry the shift lights at all we could have it off.
58:40	We've got simple, or gear dependent.
58:41	Simple, I'll show you what that means now before we go any further.
58:44	It just means we've got 4 stages of shift lights that we can use for this particular shift light module, when it's in simple mode.
58:51	And it's just giving us a basic map between which light is triggered at which RPM point.
58:56	So we've got 6600, 6800, 7000 and 7200 are when each one of these stages are going to be triggered so that's what I mean by simple.
59:05	If we go ahead and put it on gear dependent here, this is now giving us a 2D table where we have the gear position mapped to a light position so we can go through and modify those and make that gear dependent.
59:19	So if you're getting really trick, or you're trying to be really really specific with your shift lights, because each, the car is accelerating at a different rate in each gear because of the different gear ratio, you do actually need to map your, modify your shift light so that each gear has a different stage of shift lights to get your shift timing right to the driver.
59:39	The idea being that you want, regardless of the gear, you want the timing of the shift light, so the amount of time each one of those lights is on for, you want to that to be constant so it allows the driver to get a bit of a rhythm so they understand, they can sort of say 1, 2, 3, 4 and it becomes the same sort of timing regardless of which gear you're in which is going to be different because of the different acceleration map.
01:00:00	But that's not a value we're using for this car, we're just using a really simple method here.
01:00:03	Now the engine RPM input is obviously our engine speed channel which is coming to us over the CAN bus from the ECU.
01:00:10	We've got an option to do some filtering which is a moving average filter here to basically try and get rid of some outliers and we've got a little option to get rid of some hysteresis there as well.
01:00:19	We've got, also the option to do downshifts.
01:00:23	So we could be using these lights to tell us whether it was safe to downshift at any particular point, we don't use that function in this car and we've got, if we do use the gear dependent option here, we can tell it which channel we want to use to tell the logger which gear we're in.
01:00:39	But obviously we're not using that here and because we're not using downshift we've got the, you've left this blank as well.
01:00:45	OK the last part here is the shift light module.
01:00:48	So this gives you an idea of what a shift light module looks like.
01:00:52	Essentially it's just one row of these LEDs that are mapped here like this and each one of these rows is a different behaviour depending on which trigger we're using to show our information.
01:01:03	So in this case we've got our shift lights one, this is what the pattern will look like when the first shift light comes on, is triggered.
01:01:09	This one will show, then this is the second one, this is the third one and this is the fourth one so that's going to go 1, 2, 3, 4.
01:01:17	So when you shift, it's going to shift when you go red like that.
01:01:19	When that warning light message, the one that we looked at before, configuring when you've got a warning that's showing any of those alarms comes on, if it's going to send a warning message, this is what's going to be showing in the shift light module, that means these 2 red LEDs will be showing at the side and we've got different options here, because this is also a road registered car we've got options to show here if you've got indicators left or right, low fuel, high beam, if you've got the cruise control active, if you're using launch control, this is when the launch control status is shown, these will be flashing at you here like this so you've got the option to define, each one of these, define which channel is going to define it to be that light pattern to be true and you've got the option to change the colours, whether it's a flash or whether it's constant, which ones are shown, it's really heavily configurable, you can see and it's quite a nice feature.
01:02:11	We've also got some options to change the brightness, whether it's a constant brightness, whether we use a channel to map it to or whether we're mapping it to a backlight brightness switch which we actually have active on this car as well so that's fully configurable for each one of these patterns.
01:02:30	We can see here we're mapping it to an SLM which is the particular MoTeC product that we are mapping it to and this is telling us which bus, which of the CAN bus that particular device is listening on here.
01:02:41	We've also got the option to control a completely separate SLM unit which we're not using for our case, we're only using 1 SLM but it is quite common to see multiple SLMs or multiple shift light modules being used for different things.
01:02:52	So on some cars you might have 2, one each side and they'll be used for slip and lock lights.
01:02:57	What I mean by that is, you might have a left side one that shows a certain colour for front left brake locking and obviously the right hand one would be showing front right brake locking.
01:03:06	You can show different colours for different positions in the car or you might have a different colour show up for wheel slip as in drive slip vs brake locking.
01:03:12	There's all sorts, you can see how there can be all sorts of different ways of using those and it's really nice to be able to control all that logic through the dashboard control as well.
01:03:22	The next menu we're going to go through is the online menu here.
01:03:25	So if we want to download the log data, that's one place you can do it.
01:03:28	You can also do it through this little button here which is the one that most people will be using most of the time to get logged data.
01:03:34	But that's the exact same control.
01:03:36	You'll see a lot of these, almost all of these will be, these controls are duplicated with these little fast buttons here but we'll go through all of them one by one here.
01:03:45	This is where we send the configurations, so once we've modified the configuration, if we want we can save it and then we can send it to the dash that's the exact opposite process of pulling the configuration from the logger, we can send it to the logger as well from the software.
01:03:59	This is the get configuration, that's the one we used earlier when we pulled the configuration from the logger.
01:04:04	We've also got the option to zero sensors, so this is something that any sensors that need zeroing before you head out on track, this is where you do that.
01:04:10	Let me get this configuration before I do that.
01:04:18	OK so there's actually no zeros set up anywhere, apart from these damper position ones here which aren't actually connected to the car at the moment.
01:04:25	So what I'll go do is I'm going to make some zeros for our accelerometers that are built into the dashboard so I'll put, accel here for accelerometers and I'm going to go through and, I'm going to go through here and add some channels so let's find our, different channels, lat G, so the idea here is that at the start of each day or certainly at the start of each event you go through and zero all of these channels.
01:04:54	So I'm going to and make the lat G and that's going to be zeroed to a value of 0 so as long as the car's static and it's sitting on a level surface, this is where I want to be doing this, typically I'd be zeroing all of my acceleration channels when the car is sitting on the setup patch.
01:05:08	So we'll add that one there, I'll add another one, I'm going to put G long.
01:05:16	And I'm also going to want to set that to 0, so the idea here is that see we've got, this is the live value, so we've got, lateral is sitting at 0, longitudinal is at 0.07, because I've got the car sitting here level on the setup patch, this is where I can come and press zero all and it'll basically put an offset in here and now all of the acceleration channels are going to be starting from zero when I start my running on track.
01:05:42	So that is the purpose of the zeroing function.
01:05:47	We've got the option to set the reference lap here so we'll go through it a little bit later, how we actually generate the reference lap in MoTeC but essentially the process is once you have got a logged lap that you want to use as a reference, I can send that lap, I can basically save it as a small reference lap file and here is where I load that, So I can go and press this browse button and I can go to wherever I've got that reference lap stored, whether that's on my laptop or an external harddrive, this is where I can come and select that lap so this is how we upload the reference lap to the dash.
01:06:16	We've got the option to monitor channels, so the idea here is that it is giving us a real output in real time of any of the channels that we are looking at.
01:06:24	So this is quite good for debugging, if you've got problem with a sensor, this is one of the places you might want to come look at it, so you look at it in the exact output you're getting in real time.
01:06:33	So let's have a look here, so you can see that value of longitudinal G force that we had, what else have we got here that's interesting? We can see we've got our 8 volt auxiliary supply so that's the nominal voltage that's going to be supplied to any sensors that are using an 8 volt rail voltage there.
01:06:53	We've got a battery voltage there showing real time as well.
01:06:56	So that's the purpose of monitor channels, we've got the option to simulate, so what I mean by that is we've got the option to override so whether you're testing logic that the logger's using or whether you want to test, for whatever reason, usually it's again for debugging, if you want to manually override, so it's kind of putting a fake value in there for the testing you want to do, this is where you can do that.
01:07:17	So you can set up lots of different ways of doing it but if I wanted to come here and override the antilag status to 1, I could do that here to force the antilag status to on.
01:07:27	So that's one and I can come back here and put it back to 0.
01:07:30	So you can do that for any of the channels that the logger's got access to, you can override those which is a really useful function if you're debugging your system.
01:07:39	We've got the option here to view the running totals, so this is showing us all of the values, these default running totals value so whether it's fuel used, we're not using fuel used or total fuel used values, we've got the option to reset the lap count, the current lap distance or the odometer.
01:07:56	So we've go the option to come through and reset those.
01:07:58	So depending on how you want to do that for your setup, what I've typically done in the past as part of my checklist at the start of each race event, I come through and reset all of these values back to 0, maybe not the odometer depending how you're using it but this is a place where you can come and reset all of those values for the start of the new race weekend depending on how you want to use those.
01:08:15	We've got another section here to test all the inputs, so all those pins that we talked about, all of the input pins that we talked about earlier in the configuration here, we can see the raw values that are coming off those so that can be really really useful again as part of a debugging sort of process, we can see the exact values that are coming from all of the input pins that we've got, whether they're internal pins, external pins, really a nice function there as well.
01:08:41	We've got the ability to test all of the auxiliary outputs so we can manually come and set those to different values here.
01:08:47	Again this is really just debugging stuff when you're going to be, when you want to test something and here you've got the option to override different values on the display so if I want to make the bar graph active, I can click that and press start and I can see in front of me, basically the bar graph is manually moving up and down, I can stop that here so it's again depending on what you want to test.
01:09:10	I can come and debug, if I had a problem with my dash and I wasn't sure if it was a problem with my programming or maybe a physical problem with the dash that I wanted to force it to do, this is a place where you can come and do that which is again just a nice debugging tool.
01:09:23	Under the miscellaneous section here we've got options to erase the logged data so this is one place you can come and manually clear the data if you need to.
01:09:30	We'll go through, when we go through the download process, you'll see there's options on, we've got different options for how we can define whether the logged data is overwritten, or if the logged data memory is erased every time we do a download, or whether it remains but if you want to manually erase it, you can come and do that here, you can show the serial number of the dash.
01:09:51	We can manually force a different display mode on the dash and last one is to reset any push button beacons if you're using a manual beacon.
01:10:01	We've also got options down here to update the firmware and put any dash options here so the way MoTeC handles their licensing is essentially all, for most cases all of the hardware is already preconfigured inside of your logger or dashboard and if you want to upgrade it rather than actually having to send your dash in, dash or logger in to get upgraded, lets say you wanted more logging memory, you can pay for an upgrade, one time upgrade for that dash and the idea here is that it unlocks the features and this is where you can come and put those unlock codes in that you can get directly from MoTeC.
01:10:35	The last sections here is tools, so we've got the option to edit channels.
01:10:39	So we've got different sections here, we can, let's go through and click on them, so this is kind of like a raw, really getting into the base level of all of the different channels here so all of the different channels that are pre built into the logger and any you configure, you configure yourself, you can come in here and rename them, you can change how the units are displayed, you can see what the base resolution is.
01:11:00	You can see what the default units were before they were renamed and repurposed.
01:11:08	So in this case, this original channel was a GP for general purpose percentage and it's been used for an adiabatic efficiency and then we've got the option to put the abbreviation here and a few other options that go with it so if you were to go through and be resetting this logger back to factory, you've got the option to get rid of anything that's been configured and just use the default values here.
01:11:28	The other options here, we've got some connection settings.
01:11:31	So this is just saying that we're using an ethernet connection to the device which is this serial number, the serial number being 1686 and we've got some options here to come and rename them.
01:11:42	We've got a way of coming in here and looking at the connected devices.
01:11:45	So there are actually 2 connections here listed but we're actually only connected to 1 of them because we can see it's duplicated here, it's giving us a serial number and then the dash and then some IP address information here and the port number as well.
01:12:00	And then the options, this is where we can come and set some of the miscellaneous options, so we've got options here to update the event venue and vehicle details, essentially this is giving you a prompt every time each one of these events happens.
01:12:13	So what I mean by that is we've got a tick box here to say each time we open the dash manager, before we send a configuration file before we retrieve the logged data, after we retrieve the logged data, or after getting a configuration file, the idea here, and we saw that when I fired up the dash manager at the start, it asked me if I wanted to update any of those values and it is a nice idea, it is a good idea to leave those prompts coming up because it is really easy to forget to update those details and it's really important to have them right.
01:12:40	Options here around log clearing, so we've got different behaviours here, we've got always clear after each download, ask after each download or never clear.
01:12:48	So I've got it set on ask after each download, so generally I will always say yes I want to clear it, there are some times when maybe you don't, maybe you want to leave the logged data so someone else can go in there and download it after you, sometimes that's important but you have got the option there also to force it clear after each download as you go and the idea here is that you're keeping that logged data memory clear the whole time so generally my process is that every time the cars are on track, I download it and I clear the logged data each time.
01:13:14	That means I've got the maximum logging space available to me each time and it means that each time I go to download the data I know that only the latest log data is going to mean that I'm not interested generally in previously logged data because I don't want to duplicate that each time I do my download.
01:13:30	So we've got some more basic configuration options here for where we're going to put our channels list.
01:13:36	And then we've got, which is just like a configuration, each time you've got a channels list it's defined inside your logger, there's basically a small file that's associated with that and that's the position in your PC where it's going to be stored.
01:13:50	And it's got some options here for storing the user channels and user file and when to read the user channels as well.
01:13:57	The last tab here is just a help tab which is a really important thing to get used to.
01:14:03	So I definitely recommend you spend some time looking at the help file for the device you're using.
01:14:08	MoTeC do a really good job of putting all of the help information in there, it's a pretty complete resource, certainly even as an experienced user you'll still find yourself going in and checking the help file resources from time to time.
01:14:19	There is stuff, particularly the things you don't use very often, you'll want to go and refer to the help file to see how everything works.
01:14:27	We've got some different lists, some pinouts there, release notes and then the option here look at about the dash manager so this is just essentially giving us some version control on which copy of the dash manager so this is something you'll find over time, sometimes the firmware will be updated in your logging device and you generally have to have the firmware and the version of the software that you're using to access that logger will have to match and that's certainly the case in MoTeC, when you do a firmware update in the dash, you have to have the matching piece of software to go with it to be able to talk to it.
01:14:56	So that's it for all of the main menu controls.
01:14:59	As I said before we've got these tabs along here which are really just duplications of the options we can find up here.
01:15:05	It's not worth going through those again.
01:15:07	But now at this stage, once you're happy with your configuration, you can go ahead and send that to your logger so that's what I've got here.
01:15:14	If we press the send button, we can confirm the venue and everything that we've got, that's part of those options that we went and set before when it's going to give you the prompt to update the information.
01:15:26	And then you can see here it's sending all this stuff through and once it's complete, this little box will disappear and now we have the latest configuration sent to the dash.
01:15:38	So at this point, we can be pretty confident that we've got everything set up well.
01:15:42	At this point I recommend that you go ahead and if possible, if you can drive the car and the download some logged data, so ideally if you can maybe drive around the block if it's road legal, if not, you can take your chances or take it to your local racetrack but the idea, even if you can't drive it, even if you just run the car, statically, rev the engine a bit, activate as many of the different sensors as you can.
01:16:04	The idea here is that you can then download that data, look at it inside your analysis software and make sure that you're actually happy as possible you can be with he logged data that's coming out, just to make sure that everything looks like it's logging correctly.
01:16:16	Now the final part of the intitial configuration that you need to consider doing is to get your analysis project set up.
01:16:22	Now your analysis project is something that is always going to evolve over time but for a start you want to get yourself set up with the basic analysis tools you know you're going to use, so we go through those in a lot of detail in the course but this is things like all of the driver inputs, certainly all the things that you're logging, whether it's throttle position and steering trace, brake position, you want to go through and make sure you've got all of these values already set up with a way to visualise them inside of whether it's tables, report tables, time/distance graphs, XY plots.
01:16:53	Get yourself as set up as you can, obviously as I said, this stuff will change over time but have it roughly set up with the channel names that you're going to use, that's part of the purpose of downloading that first set of logged data out of your logger, whether you're driving it around the block or just running it there in the workshop, it'll help you go through and set up your analysis project with all of the channel names and everything that you're going to be using for your particular logger configuration.
01:17:19	Again, doing that just means that when you do get to the track and you're going to start analysing things, everything's going to be pretty set up.
01:17:24	So this is when you're going to go through and set up all of your conventions, whether it's colour conventions or direction conventions, what's going to be positive and negative values, is is a chance for you to go through and correct and set any of that up so you an hit the ground running when it comes time to actually do the analysis for yourself.
01:17:39	So at that point, we can be happy that our configuration of our logger is complete.

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Professional Motorsport Data Analysis: Step 1: Initial Configuration

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Step 1: Initial Configuration

1.17.46

Professional Motorsport Data Analysis: Step 1: Initial Configuration

Watch This Course

$197 USD $98.50 USD

Course Access for Life

60 day money back guarantee

Step 1: Initial Configuration

1.17.46

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