Version 66: XY

Ford GT #66We have another version ready, full of goodies and improvements. The most visible new feature is certainly the new plot type: X/Y plots. They are a bit basic in their current form, a herald of things to come, but they are already quite useful. Scroll down to see an example configuration!

There is a ton of other stuff in this release as well, so here is an abridged list:

  • The channel selection menu for the graphs now stays open until you dismiss it.
  • You can now navigate the graphs with the keyboard. The mouse moves the cursor like normal, but you can now also move the cursor by pressing ← or →, and you can zoom in or out with ↑ and ↓.
  • We made a major performance improvement of the graph, especially on Windows.
  • We added a special math channel for Speedway users, calculating wheel slip in a different way that works on a Speedway bike.
  • The “Current Values” window (usually at the top right) was using long channel names, wasting a lot of space. Now it uses short channel names.
  • In version 62, we added the possibility to flip the delta graph, but there was a bug that made all lap colors the same when you do that. This is now fixed.
  • We now limit the number of simultaneously open laps to 30. 30 is enough squiggly lines to get confused anyways.
  • The “Add Runs” dialog is now bigger by default, and saves its size between restarts.
Speed vs. Acceleration on the XY Plot

Comparing Speed with Acceleration on the XY graph gives you a simple way of checking whether a change to the engine settings had the desired effect.

We also made some changes specific to certain lap timers:

  • For the UniGo:
    • The steering wheel sensor on the UniBox now calibrates itself automatically.
    • Barometric pressure now imports correctly from the UniGo 8005.
  • For the ALFANO:
    • The steering wheel and pedal sensors on ALFANO now import under the correct channel names. Also, the units for the lambda sensor are now correct.
    • OCD can now import ALF files from VisualData2 or the ALFANO Android app.
    • The track map now shows up correctly no matter the hemisphere you drive in.

As always, you can get the new version from the downloads page, or simply restart your old version of Off Camber Data. If you would like to contribute, and especially if you have some thoughts on additions to the X/Y plots, feel free to just comment on the blog, or send us an email at feedback@offcamberdata.com!

Version 62: Fit and Finish

Version 62This version has a lot of changes, and addresses a lot of issues, but most of them are so small you barely even notice them … unless you do, and then it’s the most annoying thing in the world. We want to make sure that OCD does not only have the features you need, but that all the features we have are thought through and a joy to use. So here is a grab-bag of refinements that should make your analysis sessions a little easier, and maybe even a little more fun:

  • We made some visual changes to make it more obvious that you can drag and reorder graphs. To reorder them click and hold on the name of the channel, and drag it into the desired position.
  • Off Camber Data now shows split lines in the video sync dialog. This makes it much easier to synchronize the video with the data when you can see the magnetic loop on the track surface in the video.
  • Some people prefer to invert the delta graph, so that it measures “Time Gained” instead of “Time Lost”, down is bad, and up is good. We added an option in the settings to make this possible.
  • The “Add Runs” dialog can filter by driver, track, or kart. Those filters stay around until you clear them, even when you restart OCD. It is a little too subtle to see right now when you have a filter enabled, and so sometimes the dialog does not show your runs, and it’s hard to see why. We are working on improving that dialog comprehensively, but until that is ready, we made a simpler change: We added a big “Clear Filters” button.
  • We made some assorted improvements to the Alfano support. The values are now a little more accurate,  Off Camber Data understands more channels, and can now keep importing even if some channels are unknown to us.
  • Sometimes the video widget would not resize properly. Now it does!
  • We updated the Swedish and German translations. Thank you Niclas!
  • The slip channel is calculated from RPM and Speed, but it was unclear whether it uses GPS Speed or Wheel Speed. We changed it so that now it follows the settings on the run. In other words, it uses GPS Speed if “Prefer GPS” is clicked, and Wheel Speed otherwise.
  • The channel button now looks a little more like a button. On some versions of Windows, it was hard to notice that you can click it at all!
  • Off Camber Data makes backups of every file that it imports. In this version, even files that fail to import are backed up. In some scenarios, this makes it easier for us to diagnose problems.

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

Version 60: Hollywood Edition

60Off Camber Data turns 60! And with that, we have a major new version ready for you. The headline feature this time around: Video support!

You can now associate a GoPro video with every run. When you mouse over the graph, Off Camber Data will show the exact time in the video at your cursor position. That means you can very accurately compare lines and braking zones. This also helps tremendously when you spotted some strange data, and you want to see what was going on at the time.

You can also click on the video to start playing it. It will play one video for each selected lap, up to four at the same time. You can also select a passage in the graph and hit play. This will replay that passage over and over again. That’s useful when you want to compare that passage specifically, and see side-by-side what happened. It looks something like this:
OCD in video configuration

A few things are worth noting:

  • We have only tried this with GoPro videos. It will probably also work with other cameras, but we can’t officially support that until we have tried it. If you are using a camera other than a GoPro, please let us know at feedback@offcamberdata.com! We are interested both when it works, and when it doesn’t work, so we can either fix it, or add your camera to the list of officially supported cameras.
  • At the moment, it is necessary to synchronize the video with the data manually. We have a prototype that can do this automatically. This is obviously a huge time saver at the track. We want to release this feature as soon as possible, but to do so we need a lot of example pairs of data and video to tweak the algorithm. Once again, please contact us at feedback@offcamberdata.com if you can help with this.

Video is cool, but we have some other features and fixes as well:

  • We expanded the track database. You can of course still create your own tracks, but with the track database feature, you can have the track ready before you go out for the first time. Also, by using it you can be sure that you are using the same track definition as your friends and team-mates, so that the data is comparable.
  • OCD now keeps track of which runs you have imported before. By default, it will not let you import the same run again, but you can still do it by going in the menu, to File ⇒ Import All.
  • Especially for large stores, OCD often took a long time to start up. Performance work never stops and there is always more to do, but we put some time into speeding up cold starts of the program. If you have a lot of runs you should see a big difference.
  • We thought we would spruce up the graph display a little bit, and show a cool fade under each data line that is by itself.
  • Some temperature channels were shown in OCD with more precision than the sensors can provide. We reduced the precision for some of those channels.
  • With the glare at some track-side data analysis stations, it’s often difficult to see the color highlights for the minimum and maximum values in the Min/max screen, so we made them bold as well.
  • While importing multiple runs at the same time, OCD now keeps the tags from one run to the next. That way, when you have five drivers coming in at the same time, from the same session, you can set the tag identifying the heat for the first one, and just click “Import” for all the others.
  • When creating a new UniBox configuration, OCD now starts with the default factory settings, instead of an empty configuration.
  • There was a problem where finding previous notes was not reliable, but only east of London. Now, this feature works east of London, west of London, and even in London itself!

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

Version 56: Smooth Operator

Project 56This is a small update, with most of the changes in the background, but there is one thing we wanted to call out: For those of you who have a UniBox, this version makes it much more useful. The gyro and accelerometer axis are now smoothed to make it easier to see the data, and we added a new math channel: Inverse corner radius.

Inverse corner radius tells you how much the driver is turning. A value around 0 means no turning. A value above 0 means you’re turning right. A value below 0 means you’re turning left. The higher/lower the value, the sharper the turn. This way you can see if, for example, in one lap you had a sharp turn-in and a smooth exit, or the other way around, and you’ll be able to see which one is faster.

A graph showing inverse corner radius

In the highlighted section, the green lap loses about 0.2 seconds. On the inverse corner radius graph, you can see that the red lap turns in earlier, and then switches direction slightly sooner, than the driver in the green lap.

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

Finally, if you are going to the Supernationals in Las Vegas, make sure to say hi! We’ll be there from Thursday to Sunday.

Version 55: Keeping Tabs

55Today, we have another very cool release for you. Several people have asked for it, and we’re proud to finally deliver it: Configurable graph layouts. With this new feature, you can define several graph configurations, for example one for a quick overview for the driver, one for a detailed analysis of some turns, and one for engine tuning. This will make it much faster to get you to the data you need.

Screenshot showing the layouts feature

In this configuration, I have three pre-configured layouts: “Overview”, “Temperatures”, and “Engine”.

But that’s not all. We have a bunch of other features in this release as well:

  • In the track management window, you can now download track settings from the OCD server. That way you can arrive at a new track fully prepared with magnet and GPS settings. Please help us fill out our track database! If your favorite track is missing from the list, email us at feedback@offcamberdata.com!
  • Speaking of tracks: Now, when you synchronize the tracks between OCD and the UniGo, it does not delete tracks that are on the UniGo already. It only adds new ones and updates existing ones.
  • OCD now makes sure that the track list is sorted alphabetically, both in OCD and on the UniGo. To see the change on the UniGo, you have to synchronize tracks with OCD at least once.
  • Finally, on the topic of tracks, if you have no track set and you do a run with GPS enabled, OCD now suggests creating a new track during import. It was already possible to create a track from a new run, but we made it easier to discover, and faster, for a better experience at a new track.
  • There was a surprisingly common problem when importing .ocd files from one computer into another. This is now fixed!
  • We got a new update for the Dutch language, thanks to Martijn Nelissen. Thank you!
  • We also got an update for Swedish, thanks to Niclas Andersson. Thank you as well!
  • Due to a bug, units were untranslatable in the previous version of OCD. This is now fixed, and units are translatable. We don’t have all the translations yet, but we are working on it!
  • Sometimes, the numbers in the min/max window differed from the numbers in the graph window. This is now fixed.
  • We made some detailed fixes to how the graphs are drawn. In particular, we changed how stretching works, and how the Y-axis is drawn.
  • There were some differences in how you can configure the UniGo on the device vs. how you can configure it from OCD. We made sure they are the same now.
  • Finally, we fixed a handful of crashes, some that were brought to our attention by you, and some we found ourselves.

We think this is a really cool release, and so I want to thank everyone who came to us with feedback and suggestions. I want to thank those of you especially whose suggestions take a long time to respond to. There are only three of us, so we cannot do everything right away, but we do take every bit of feedback seriously. Ultimately, it lets us make releases like this one.

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

Version 52: Smörgåsbord

Number 52This is an exciting release! We have a big number of changes, and many of them were suggestions from you. Let’s go through them:

  • You can now reorder the graphs. Just grab them by the title, and pull up or down. The order of the graphs is saved even when you close and restart the program.
  • We removed a lot of the empty space between graphs, so you can fit more graphs on the screen and see the data with more accuracy. Both of these changes are good for every situation, but they are particularly good if you have pedal sensors, and you want to see throttle pedal and brake pedal next to each other. We experimented with putting those two on top of each other, into the same graph, but all the lines get too confusing when you have more than one selected lap. We know that a lot of people are interested in this, so please let us know what you think about this decision!
  • OCD finally has support for Units, so if you like, you can show your speed in miles per hour, meters per second, or knots.
  • In the last release, we added the notes field to give you a place to keep setup information. To make this easier, OCD automatically fills in the notes field from a previous run. If you have one driver, this works great, but if you have many, it often pulls the notes from the wrong driver. So we fixed it. Now, it pulls notes only from earlier runs of the same driver.

Those are the big ones, but there are a few smaller ones as well:

  • When changing the UniGo settings, OCD would sometimes overwrite a setting by accident. This no longer happens.
  • We were not very consistent with the channel names. Sometimes it was “Tire Temp FR”, sometimes it was “FR TTemp”, and so we went through and organized them. This should make it easier for our translators as well, but it might take us a few weeks to get all new translations in for everything. In the meantime, we apologize for having so much untranslated text.
  • Our TSV export did not include final lap times, because of the way the data was formatted. We changed the format a little, so now the lap times are there.
  • Sometimes, when you zoom in enough, the graph would show little spikes. It no longer does.
  • Some customers have problems with corrupted files that would not import properly into OCD. Corrupted files are always a problem, but we changed some things around to get a little more data out of them.

There is also a hidden feature that we’ll talk about next time. It is included in this release, but we felt it’s not quite good enough yet. If you find out what it is, let us know :-).

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!

Version 49: Noteworthy

49The big change in this release is the notes field. Many people want to save the setup with their runs, and we drew up some elaborate ways of doing this. However, every team has a different way of keeping track of their setup, and it’s very difficult to come up with a solution that makes everybody happy. So for now, we decided to keep it simple. In version 49, every run has a text field that can be used for setups, or notes of any kind. You can fill this in right when you import, or later if you don’t have time right away. To make it easier to keep track of setups, we added a button that finds the last run at the same track, and fills in the information from there.

Load notes from previous runs

We have some other changes as well:

  • You can now choose between three modes, Car, Kart, and Speedway mode. These settings appear when you first start the program, or in the settings dialog. When you change to Speedway, it changes some of the text in the program, and also tweaks some other settings to work better for Speedway tracks.
  • It is now possible to save a track to a file, and then load it again later, for example on your friend’s computer. To do this, go to the Track Management window, and find the “save” and “restore” buttons underneath the list of tracks.
  • There used to be some trouble loading and viewing files with very long laps. These would only happen if something goes wrong with the lap timer, but OCD should never slow down like that, so we went ahead and fixed it anyways.

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!

Version 48: Bokmål

48You may have guessed it from the title: Today’s headline feature is support for Norwegian in the form of Bokmål. If someone wants to provide us with a translation into Nynorsk, we’ll be happy to add it, but this should help most of you. A big thanks to Kjetil Flood-Engebretsen, who provided this translation.

We also have a few smaller fixes in this version:

  • RaceRender export now supports all channels. Before, it would only support a few standard channels like GPS coordinates, speed and RPM. Now every channel that is logged is exported to RaceRender, so you can fully customize your gauges.
  • Swedish has received a minor update, with some translations added, and others improved.
  • We had some performance issues, and sometimes even crashes, with some data that came from a broken GPS antenna. This should be a rare case, but OCD should never crash with any data, so we went ahead and fixed it.
  • Finally, we made a lot of changes under the hood to better support the UniBox.

Since we were talking about RaceRender: If you used OCD together with RaceRender of DashWare to make a particularly exciting video, feel free to send it to us either at feedback@offcamberdata.com, or on Facebook. We’d love to see what you’re up to!

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!

Version 46: La Scatola

Number 46This release has two big items and two small ones:

  • The first big item is a translation into Italian. We are very grateful to Mariano de Faveri for providing this translation.
  • We have been working on this for months, but we can finally talk about it: Off Camber Data can now configure the UniBox. The UniBox is the most significant expansion of the UniGo system since the initial launch. Apart from the built-in six-axis accelerometer, it makes it possible to connect more sensors than any other logger in karting. It can do pedal sensors, temperature sensors, speed sensors for all wheels, and many more. It is completely extensible, so over the next few months we’ll be expanding the range of available sensors, and open up the possibility of adding custom sensors to the system. Of course, OCD will have to grow with the system to make the new data more useful and accessible.
The UniBox, with six expansion ports, and a seventh port for power.

The UniBox, with six expansion ports, and a seventh port for power.

We also fixed two smaller things. Both of these were suggestions by customers. We’re very grateful for these suggestions, as they help us find out what is important for you, and what we should focus on next. If we haven’t gotten to your suggestion yet, please hold tight! We’re doing our best to catch up.

  • We made sure the way you configure the settings on the UniGo match the way you configure them in OCD. There were some confusing differences before, but they are now fixed.
  • Speaking of confusion, we also cleaned up the naming of the TSV/CSV export functions. It now says TSV everywhere, and that is our default for exporting, since it can simply be copied and pasted into Excel. You can still export as CSV if you like, by just naming the file <something>.csv.

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!

Version 45: Keeping things the same

45Hot on the heels of version 43, we have version 45. 44 was a ninja release to fix some rather important functionality, but this one is a real release with a few new goodies:

  • The biggest thing is a new language: Dutch! A big thank you to Martijn Nelissen, who provided the Dutch translation.
  • We fixed a few problems with exporting, including giving the right file extension, and correctly handling special characters in driver names, run names, etc.
  • We added the missing languages in the UniGo config.
  • The rest of the changes bring us to the theme for this release:
    • Off Camber Data now remembers your settings from the Min/Max window across restarts.
    • It also remembers which screen you were looking at. If you were looking at the histogram when you closed it, it opens back up with the histogram.
    • Finally, OCD now remembers the width of the run selection window. This seems like a small thing, but if you are working a lot with tags, you know why this is important!

As part of this release, I’d like to congratulate to Bryan for having his first changes in this release! Bryan’s work has been making the releases run smoothly for quite a while now, but this is the first time his efforts actually ship as part of Off Camber Data.

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!