This firmware release is worth making a special announcement as it contains a number of improvements centered around ease-of-use and provides defaults that work out of the box.
Get the firmware from the Downloads page and enjoy improved capabilities of your RaceCapture/Pro system!
Accelerometer / Yaw sensor smoothing
Based on some great feedback from our community we updated the filtering for the accelerometer / yaw channels to use an Exponential Moving Average IIR filter. Low firmware CPU overhead and a characteristic that weighs newer samples more heavily that older samples makes it ideal for use in the firmware. The current “Alpha” (dampening) setting is a value between 0 and 1; right now it is fixed in the firmware at 0.1. Accelerometers are sampled in the background at 100Hz – default firmware SD logging rate is 30Hz.
In the future we will make the alpha configurable by the user as well as extending the filtering to the analog input and timer (e.g. RPM) inputs.
Distance Channel
Long needed, Distance is now being calculated and reported along with GPS speed, time and position. If a start/finish line is configured, the distance channel resets to zero on each lap. The telemetry web interface at race-capture.com already makes use of the distance channel; watch for an update to RaceAnalyzer and the mobile app- It will make analysis far more effective!
Telemetry Rate Limiting
This is especially useful as 1) it dramatically improves the out-of-the-box experience: you just need to set up the RaceCapture/Pro Device ID; and 2) SD logging rates can be set higher while telemetry is automatically throttled. The rate limits are set to 10Hz for Cellular Telemetry mode and 50Hz when linked via Bluetooth module to mobile app.
Future firmware versions will make the sampling rates configurable for both SD and Telemetry mode.
Telemetry Background Streaming
The firmware now defaults to continuous background streaming of telemetry data- an additional move towards making things “just work” out-of-the-box. Now, as soon as RaceCapture/Pro powers up, it makes a connection to race-capture.com and data will flow. Formal start/stop of logging is preserved for the SD card, plus these start/stop events are relayed via telemetry to note logging boundaries. Like the previous new capabilities, we’ll make this feature configurable in an upcoming release.
What’s Next?
Look forward for this upcoming features!
- CAN bus interface
- Dashboard enhancements
- RaceAnalyzer enhancements