dash loggers

[Colin]

i've noticed that a few of the teams run their dash loggers at the event. how do teams get away with it in the cost report? our dash is worth about a quarter of what the car is just wondering as i'd love to run our's in the car this year instead of making a display from scratch!

cheers and good work to all the aussie teams that competed in the US

[Colin]

i've noticed that a few of the teams run their dash loggers at the event. how do teams get away with it in the cost report? our dash is worth about a quarter of what the car is just wondering as i'd love to run our's in the car this year instead of making a display from scratch!

cheers and good work to all the aussie teams that competed in the US

[Matt Gignac]

We've costed our dash logger, but it isn't all that expensive.

Basically a really old Palmpilot in the steering wheel, programmed by ourselves and hooked up to our home-made ECU. I don't think it costs more than about 50$, and it does all sorts of stuff. Plus you can play Dope Wars on it when you're not driving.

Matt G
McGill Racing Team

[Colin]

yea that's our other option, we run a motec ECU but have a preety powerfull microcontroller to controll our shifting system so if we can't find a way to use the motec dash we'll have to do somthing like you have done. do you know how you configured the palmpilot to talk to your ECU?

[Andy K]

<BLOCKQUOTE class="ip-ubbcode-quote"><font size="-1">quote:</font><HR>Originally posted by Matt Gignac:
We've costed our dash logger, but it isn't all that expensive.

Basically a really old Palmpilot in the steering wheel, programmed by ourselves and hooked up to our home-made ECU. I don't think it costs more than about 50$, and it does all sorts of stuff. Plus you can play Dope Wars on it when you're not driving.

Matt G
McGill Racing Team <HR></BLOCKQUOTE>Yeah, that was our old setup... for this year's car we threw in a newer model with backlighting and enough memory to store about 2hrs of data. our computer guys were like little kids in a candy store when they started processing the data from the acceleration run. It clearly showed that we bogged down too much... to the point where our driver let off the gas completely yet still were able to hit 62 mph by the end of the run.

Colin, you also have to understand that we have a full custom setup including ecu, tuning software for the PC. So we've been able to cut the cost of these items considerably.

[Colin]

yea i understand that you have a custom system, our microcontoller is on the motec CAN bus so we have access to all the system data ie RPM, throttle position, ect. but getting thae controller to talk to a display ie a palmpilot sounds like a lot of work how long did it take you guys to get the display working?

[Charlie]

The ADL is expensive, but we get excellent competition data from it, and it also controls a few parts of our car we consider vital.

However we could make boxes that replace the ADL for a couple functions and have basically the same car. We might consider that, as the cost difference would have meant a 2nd place this year!