The Northwest Region SCCA

2012 Solo Championship Series

… that’s right, we’re now the title sponsor of the very racing series
that first inspired our interest in motorsports and led directly to the
creation of Autsport Labs! We couldn’t imagine a more perfect fit!
Big thanks to everyone who has helped us along the way!

The Team at Autosport Labs

So what do we have here?

From top left, clockwise:

• JTAG Adapter: A JTag debugging / programming adapter board to make firmware hacking easier to do on RaceCapture. Not necessary for programming, as you can program via USB using the factory bootloader using the TEST button.  This board exists because there’s just not enough room to squeeze a 20 pin header on the main RaceCapture board. This will be a common form factor for future projects of ours that support JTag.
• SensorX: Ever had to wire up resistive sensor (e.g. temperature / pressure sensor) to  an analog input, and needed to wire in that external pullup resistor? Then you know what a pain it can be to splice that pullup resistor into your wiring harness and connect it to the nearest 5v voltage reference and make it all work – Then do it multiple times for each sensor! That’s what we recently had to deal with on the Merkur for the RaceCapture/Pro Telemetry project.  This board lets you connect ground, +5V, VRef and 7 analog inputs on one side, and provides spots on the other side for 7 sensors or other devices. Pullup resistors are on-board, and can be disabled by cutting a trace. SensorX is thin enough to be shrink-wrapped and neatly installed in-line with your wiring harness!
• CoilX: This is a small adapter board which provides an opto-isolated interface to an ignition coil primary, with a logic level output that lets you safely integrate into a system’s low-level digital inputs, like on RaceCapture. Simple, and also sized to be shrink wrapped and installed in-line with your wiring harness.

What kind of wiring-harness problems have you run into that you think a simple adapter / breakout board would help solve? Let us know!

Finally: Watch out for some big news on RaceCapture- that is all :) And now, off to finishing our post on Real Time Race Car Telemetry…

When you’ve designed something with this many features- the demons of complexity come home to roost. And, when it comes to comprehensive testing it’s especially painful.

Here’s a naked yet fully tested – manually tested –  RaceCapture/Pro board with GPS and accelerometer modules installed.  When I finished the spreadsheet identifying over 100 individual hardware test cases cases I reminded myself how important an automated test rig will be for this project.

RaceCapture/Pro - naked and fully tested

Oh, Lua

What we have going for ourselves is with the embedded Lua scripting interperter – aside from providing a way to easily control almost all controller behaviors (much more on this soon) it provides an easy way to poke at the hardware for testing purposes. Check out the console screen shot (click to see full version) for an idea on what’s possible:

RaceCapture/Pro console (click for full view)

Race Cars + Lua Scripting?

Lua is proving to be a great embedded scripting language- on an upcoming post we’ll describe just how much control you will have over your race car :)

]]> http://www.autosportlabs.org/blog/?feed=rss2&p=1684 0 http://www.autosportlabs.org/blog/?p=1679 http://www.autosportlabs.org/blog/?p=1679#comments Thu, 15 Dec 2011 06:10:13 +0000 Brent Picasso http://www.autosportlabs.org/blog/?p=1679 Here is a set of RaceCapture/Pro boards, currently under test.

We just verified that all four hand-assembled accelerometer modules actually work! (small boards in green) Soldering fine pitch components is so often a sketchy exercise so I’m always a bit stunned when they come to life.

You’re looking at RaceCapture/Track – A natural variant of our current RaceCapture Data Acquisition System (now called RaceCapture/Pro) that removes the analog & digital I/O and replaces it with a CAN OBD2 interface. It also features GPS, 3 axis accelerometer and yaw sensors – all logging to conventional SD card. Plus, it sports Bluetooth for smartphone integration. As with RaceCapture/Pro, It will be OSHW.

The great thing is that it will share firmware and software with RaceCapture/Pro- so this project is on the fast track!

We are ramping up RaceCapture in a serious way – expect many more updates, very soon!

Normalized components

Updated the design to use mostly 0603 parts so we can share components across RaceCapture,  Megajolt/C and other projects.  This will save us a ton of hassle swapping component reels on the pick and place when we switch between building our projects. Yep, we’re lazy.

Stencil Printing

Boy, I wish we would’ve done this sooner. We switched from the CNC dot dispenser to our soon-to-be heavily used stencil printer with spectacular results. We saw incredible improvements in our production quality, starting with the first batch!

TPS parts always installed

The parts for the input circuit for the Throttle Position Sensor (TPS) parts are now always installed, so 5V v-ref on the Molex connector is useful even with a MAP sensor’d version.  Just don’t simultaneously use MAP and TPS or the readings will be off!

Matte Black PCB

We’re also trying out a matte black solder mask on the boards  for the near term.  I actually don’t care for it much- we currently use a ‘No Clean’ solder flux and it does leave some unsightly staining. So, next batch will be gloss black. The initial theory with the black PC boards is that reflow performance improves due to increased heat absorption of the board using the darker color. While I didn’t take any hard measurements, not one board in our recent batch had reflow issues, a case that sometimes popped up with the plain’ol green boards. Yes, I could bump the temperature up on the reflow profile, but I’m going for consistency without creating hot spots. So far, so good, aside from the cosmetic annoyances.

Updated Instructions / Software

On deck are changes to the Wiki / installation instructions and Configuration software.  Although the design is 90% the same, the current installation instructions don’t match reality. Configuration software needs a refresh as well!

This  one adapts Tachometers to work with engines converted to use multiple coil packs.  Up to 4 coil packs are supported. An annoying problem neatly solved!

This board is very small, making it easy to integrate inline into your existing wiring harness. Just wrap with electrical tape or shrink tubing!

Here it is wired for 2 coil packs: a typical 4 cylinder configuration.

Yellow wire goes to tachometer, red / black wire connects to the drive wire of each coil pack.

Available for purchase in our online store .  Full installation instructions.

We’ve taken care to optimize the graphics so they look great on light and dark clothing (We personally prefer dark)  Plus, graphics are on the back, where they belong.

Here are the winning designs:

Dr. Occa - "A Great Flame Follows a Little Spark"

Spockie-Tech & Alhbln- "Timing Does Matter"

Funky Driver- "Redefining the Basics"

Thanks again to the contest winners!

Do check out all the Autosport Labs / Powered by Megajolt gear!

]]> http://www.autosportlabs.org/blog/?feed=rss2&p=1601 0 http://www.autosportlabs.org/blog/?p=1585 http://www.autosportlabs.org/blog/?p=1585#comments Sun, 19 Jun 2011 17:22:11 +0000 Brent Picasso http://www.autosportlabs.org/blog/?p=1585 Today I received the best surprise Father’s day gift ever from my wonderful wife and partner in life, Kelley Picasso

Commissioned by TEKSTartist – the alter-ego of our über-talented and good friend Jason Markow – (check out his other work, especially this!)

Happy Father’s day to all you men living life all-out, and to their loving, supporting families!

What I learned at Dorkbot was that it was an extraordinary experience sharing Autosport Labs’ rather organic inception, growing the business, our recent acceleration, and the exciting things to come. I thought it would be great to share these slides with you, with the hopes of inspiring whatever you’re going for in life!

What have you learned following your passion? What wisdom would you share with those starting with a pocketful of dreams?