Arduino data-logger: first test

Last Wednesday was holiday here, so I spent the day with an old friend of mine at the Marlon Kart circuit.

Figure 1. The Monster... — Figure 1. The Monster… a two-stroke Rotax engine.

I seized the opportunity to test the GPS and accelerometer data-logger with Arduino. Among the several problems I encountered, the first one was some sort of incompatibility between the SoftSerial (for the GPS) and Wire (for the accelerometers) libraries. It was something memory related, so I could not log both sensors at the same time. Not a big deal, as we had all day to race.

Figure 2. The Arduino strongly fastened to the chassis... which I do strongly discourage unless we wish to deal with ludicrous amounts of noise due to strong vibrations. — Figure 2. The Arduino strongly fastened to the chassis… which I do strongly discourage unless we wish to deal with ludicrous amounts of noise due to strong vibrations.

Unfortunately I could not log useful data during this session. The GPS data was very imprecise and accelerometer data had too much noise to deal with. For the next session I expect to have both GPS and accelerometers working nicely together as well as an improved fitting for the Arduino with the addition of vibration dampening. The latter will be difficult to accomplish in a go-kart, as free spots are scarce.

Despite all that, we had a very good day at the track until the piston rod said «enough» by the end of the day.