Originally Posted by
pphaneuf
I see you're working with nitro cars, but could this be modified to gather some other information, putting probes on the motor power and sensor leads, and measure how much timing advance the ESC is applying?
A bit off-topic, but that whole telemetry/data recording business also seems very interesting, albeit in a palliative way. I could do drag runs, with various timing settings, and at least get my boost settings in the ballpark...
This is an old data aquisition box with 8 analog, 8 digital and 1 timing input. You can connect all kind of sensors as long you make the range of 0-2.5v or digital max 5v on/of switching signal. The software is modulair so you can set it up with even re-calculations on the range.
Off-track testing and tuning can be usefull but still you have to translate it to the setup of a car. Looking at a lot of toplevel drivers I do see they are not working with test benches but getting as much tracktime as possible to setup the whole car and also important: to get the track in the fingers.
And then a real time (recorded) telemetry will show directly if there are improvements or not. But finally the laptime is the most important and there are enough situations where the maximum performance of the motor does not count.