Version 36: Tron

36Unfortunately we had to do something we don’t like to do: Rush a release. Embarrassingly, we broke the track map anywhere south of the equator and east of Greenwich, so we had to push the fix out as soon as possible. There is an upside to all this: New features!

  • We now have a Swedish translation! We’re very excited about our third language. Thanks go to Niclas Andersson, who put in a lot of work for this (and many other things), and found many inconsistencies along the way as well. If you’d like to contribute another language, please let us know!
  • When you hold the mouse over the header on top of the run, it shows you the name of the run.
  • Performance improvement in the min/max window
  • On Windows, hit F11 for full-screen. On the Mac, you can use the full-screen menu entry which has always been there.
  • A big number of small fixes, such as reordering some menus, making the toolbar prettier, a crash when RPM is reported negative, better handling of infinitely large values in the graph, and many many more details that almost nobody ever sees, but that are really important when you do see them.

As always, you can get the new version from the downloads page, or simply restart your old version of Off Camber Data. For feedback, feel free to just comment on the blog, or send us an email at feedback@offcamberdata.com!

The histogram function

After the graph, the histogram is one of the most important ways to gain insights into your data. In this quick overview, I’ll show you how to use the histogram to help optimize your engine and/or gearing using the histogram.

To look at the data, I open the sample data that comes with every version of Off Camber Data. In particular, I open Matt’s run from 2014-02-13, at 12:02. When I open up the histogram, and I set the channel to RPM, it looks like this:
RPM Histogram
This shows me, for example, that on lap 7, Matt spent 5 seconds at 8000 RPM. That’s about 17% of the lap.

This is important for me to know if I’m trying to optimize the engine. I may want to choose jets based on this information, change the length of the exhaust, or modify another setting to optimize the power output at 8000 RPM. Used another way, if you know in which RPM band the engine produces the most power, you can change your gearing to try to be in that band as much as possible. This is especially true for shifter karts, but it helps even for non-shifters. Setting your final gear to get top speed at the end of the longest straight is not always the best way to set up the kart!

There is an important button at the top, this one:
On Power Button
This is the On Power button. When it’s clicked, we only consider the time while the kart is accelerating. For a channel like RPM, this makes a lot of sense. Under braking, a lot is going on with RPM, especially if you have a shifter kart, but you don’t really care about optimizing engine power at that moment. You want to optimize engine power while accelerating, and that’s what this button is for.

If you want to see the data over many laps, you can select all of them:
Histogram with many laps

This colorful view stacks all the laps on top of each other. The total size of the stacks becomes an average over all laps. You can do this with one lap, all laps, or just a few of the best laps if you don’t want to rely just on one.

I think that’s enough information for one post. As always, let us know if these are useful! You can either leave a comment below, or email us at feedback@offcamberdata.com. Cheers!

Version 34: Polyglot edition

34It’s been a while since our last release. Christmas happened, but we also worked on some exciting new stuff. Some of that will be rolled out in the next few months, but some of it is ready right now!

  • We added translations. Off Camber Data is now available in German as well as English. You can switch between the languages in the settings dialog. Now that we have one translation, we can easily add more. Some are already in the works. If you’d like to contribute a translation, please let us know!
    When you head to the download section, you’ll find that there is still only one file to download. Where are the files for the other languages? Well, we put a lot of work into making sure that you can still download that one file, and it will automatically figure out which language you’re using.
  • The graph updates a lot faster when you drag the cursor over it. You should try it out! It sounds like a small change, but it is much nicer when you actually see it.
  • You can now merge sectors. As you know, when you miss a magnet while driving, you can fix it in split time analysis by right-clicking on the sector, and choosing “Missed split”. Now you can do the opposite as well. If you accidentally fixed the wrong split, or if your sensor picked up a split that doesn’t exist, you can now right-click on the sector and choose “Merge with previous sector” or “Merge with next sector”.
    Click the small X next to the track name to close many runs at once.

    Click the small X next to the track name to close many runs at once.

  • Closing a lot of runs at once is now easier: When you mouse over the track header in lap selection (on the left side, where the runs show up), a little X appears. Click the X, and all runs from that track are closed at once.
  • There was a problem with changing run properties (such as driver, track, or kart) during import. This is now fixed.
  • There were also smaller fixes and tweaks. As always, there are too many to mention all of them, but I want to mention a few especially because they are the product of your continuous feedback:
    • The percent axis in the histogram now shows all the time.
    • Tags now show more prominently when selecting a run. They used to be the last column in run selection, which made them really hard to find. We found that people actually use tags a lot, so we made them a little easier to find.
    • In the histogram, when on-power is enabled, it only counts those times when the car or kart is accelerating. It used to be a quarter of a second of acceleration to start the count, but we got some feedback that half a second is better, so we changed it.
    • You can now toggle the background grid in both the track map and in the histogram view.

As always, you can get the new version from the downloads page, or simply restart your old version of Off Camber Data. For feedback, feel free to just comment on the blog, or send us an email at feedback@offcamberdata.com!