Nibbles wrote:
Direct question for Don, Malcolm or anyone else who does circuit racing / serious track stuff regarding the data logging side.
For lap times / split times what is the modern way to sense crossing the line. Back when I was last involved (near 20 years ago) it was infra-red beam but this was largely for practice only. Is it now RF transponder, and is it standardised and provided by the track now ? There was talk of doing this when I left the scene.
For transfer of information from device to laptop, would you prefer / expect to plug in a laptop to it, or would it be better to store on a SD card / usb stick ? I can see sense in the latter as you can keep a card for each session and no need to download in between.
My Formula Ford has both a transponder and an infra red timing beam sensor. Only the IR sensor is connected to the Pi dash/datalogger. The transponder is mandatory now and most people buy and fit their own although I believe you can also hire them for the day. This is used by MST timing to produce the official times for the event. TSL also provide a similar service. For some events they live stream the times to their web site. This has recently been extended to video coverage including on-board although I've found the quality a bit variable. MST and TSL publish all the timing on a PDF on their web site after the event.
With my Pi system and also my old M4 Pro MoTeC the only way to pull the logs was by connecting a laptop via RS232/USB. The RaceTechnology mandatory dataloggers used in the BTCC use SD cards as this is much easier for the scrutineers to collect in the post race parc ferme. I think this facility is really useful although you still need the laptop for configuring the systems such as ECU, PDM and Dash.