Is This The Missing Gadget for Cycle Analyst

[MrKang]

Cycle Analyst has a serial output which transmits all data.
Is this little PCB our sollution to record it while riding and then load i into your computer for analyzing ?



The product description link : http://www.robotshop.us/sfe-logomatic-serial-sd-datalogger.html

Anybody any experiences trying to record the serial output of the CA without a notebook or UMP etc.?

[justin_le]

Cycle Analyst has a serial output which transmits all data.
Is this little PCB our sollution to record it while riding and then load i into your computer for analyzing ?

Should Be! I just ordered one to try out. There aren't many specs provided on the webpage, as far as power consumption, file format, file naming structure etc. But if it does what it says that'd be perfect.

Justin

[MrKang]

i just emailed them when the stock is filled. they say on the website that is is filled between 1 and 3 weeks.
But to be sure i asked them. I'm waiting for an answer and then i will also order one.
Would be great to record your data and then later implement it with GPS/VIDEO etc !
Thats what i'm trying to do now. I allready have the front camera, GPS logger which exports it to GPX, A program which playes the gpx file in google earth in realtime. This will be combined with the front camera and the CA statictics embedded in the screen. Also an extra overlay of information of all lipo packs which are recorded by 4 cellogs8.

This piece would be the missing linkfor my project. I hope it works ! if you get the recorder earlier then me please give a post what you find out.

[Jeremy Harris]

I have one of these that I bought a year or so ago from Sparkfun. It works well and is remarkably versatile. Here's a link to the Sparkfun site in the US, where they seem to be in stock: http://www.sparkfun.com/commerce/produc ... ts_id=8627

Jeremy

[MrKang]

hi jeremy, did you get it worked on the CA ?

[Jeremy Harris]

No, I didn't, I used it to log GPS serial data, but it did that easily, so I would have thought it would have worked with the CA in the same way.

The version of the Logomatic I have is the previous one to the one they now sell, and uses a full size SD card. It also has an analogue mode, with a bunch of analogue inputs that can be used to log voltages from sensors. I've just re-used mineb and put it into a small alloy box to use as a general purpose stand alone data logger, powered by some AA cells.

The only slightly awkward thing about using it is that you have to programme the mode using a text file written to the SD card. The logger reads this file at power up and sets things like the sample rate etc accordingly. It's not hard to do, but needs a bit of playing around with to get used to.

Reading data from the card is easy, as it's just text that can be read into something like Excel and then post processed as you wish.

Jeremy

PS: The Sparkfun shop is an emporium of delights for those who like to tinker. Take a look here: www.sparkfun.com and note that they have a free day in January, where they are giving goods away up to the value of $100, just for the cost of the shipping.

[MrKang]

Well i'm going to try one out just like justin. I hope it will work and captures the CA data correctly.
They have explained it well and it should be no problem to configure this device as CA has a standard output of 9600,8,n,1 with some ASCII less then 100characters per line.

the sparkfun site is super ! i allready placed it into my favourites.

[danoulz]

Oooh, that thread is looking good
I shall be following your progress guys !
I'd love to correlate the data from my Cycle Analyst 2.11 with the log from my GPS tracking unit.
Cheers, Dan

[MrKang]

My data logger has just been shipped out with fedex. i will receive it in 2 days!
I will keep you updated

[MrKang]

Ding Dong...FEDEX !!

My cute little red box arrived from sparkfun!



Then i first started to read how to begin with this little monster. First you put in a formatted 1 or 2gb micro sd into your computer and format it with 16FAT

Then you out it into the data logger and connect it to the power , i used 5V from a usb charger. After powering up you'll see a quick flash of lights on th board for maybe a second or 2. Then you power the logger off and pull out the micro sd.
Slip it into your computer again and you see that it wrote 2 files.
one o them is a configuration file which the logger reads at startup. In this file you can setup the modes which the data logger will work on.
The basic setup was the correct one so i didn't edit anything.

Just put it back into the logger and then connected the TTL output from the CA into the input of the Data Logger.



Finally i powered up my CA with 2 experiment lipo's and went into the setup mode to set the output for 5Hz.

Powered up the Data Logger and watched it blink some led's (which indicate that it is writing data) so that was allready a good sign.
Then i put my figer onto the CA to give some old skool 50Hz distortions to let the parametrs change a bit.

Pushed the 'stop' button on the data logger and powered it off and pulled out the micro sd to find out if it had written anything.





And wow ! Yeah it works !!

It wrote a plain text file with these parameters:

0.0000 24.59 0.00 0.00 0.0000
0.0000 24.59 0.00 0.00 0.0000
0.0000 24.60 -0.42 0.00 0.0000
0.0000 24.60 -0.42 0.00 0.0000
0.0000 24.60 0.19 0.00 0.0000
0.0000 24.60 0.19 0.00 0.0000
0.0000 24.60 -0.03 0.00 0.0000
0.0000 24.60 -0.03 0.00 0.0000
0.0000 24.59 -0.30 0.00 0.0000
-0.0000 24.59 -0.30 0.00 0.0000
-0.0000 24.60 -0.51 0.00 0.0000
-0.0000 24.60 -0.51 0.00 0.0000
-0.0000 24.60 0.03 0.00 0.0000
-0.0000 24.60 0.03 0.00 0.0000
-0.0000 24.59 0.02 0.00 0.0000
-0.0000 24.59 0.02 0.00 0.0000
-0.0000 24.60 0.60 0.00 0.0000
-0.0000 24.60 0.60 0.00 0.0000
0.0000 24.59 0.46 0.00 0.0000
0.0000 24.59 0.46 0.00 0.0000
0.0000 24.59 0.60 0.00 0.0000
0.0001 24.59 0.60 0.00 0.0000
0.0001 24.59 0.32 0.00 0.0000
0.0001 24.59 0.32 0.00 0.0000
0.0001 24.60 -0.13 0.00 0.0000
0.0001 24.60 -0.13 0.00 0.0000
0.0001 24.59 0.25 0.00 0.0000
0.0001 24.59 0.25 0.00 0.0000
0.0001 24.59 -0.04 0.00 0.0000
0.0001 24.59 -0.04 0.00 0.0000
0.0001 24.59 0.45 0.00 0.0000
0.0002 24.59 0.45 0.00 0.0000


You can see th strnge variables cause of my 50Hz Finger! hehehe

Conclusion: Buy this thing ad log your usage from the CA !!

[justin_le]

Hey Thanks for posting those details MrKang! We got our unit in the mail today as as well, works like a charm. This is exactly what we wanted to make for the CA and sparkfun just saved a whole lot of time.

One thing to note is that the unit consumes about 40-60 mA of current from the input power supply. That's more than the CA can handle being pulled from its 5V bus. So if you bring this unit on the bike with you, it'd be best to power it from a small 1-2 Ah LiPoly cell. The logomatic board will recharge the lithium cell from the USB cable which is pretty convenient if you wanted to enclose the cell and logomatic into a small enclosure.

Sparkfun has also provided all the source code on their website. The board appears to have two UART modules, with an RX0 on the programming header and RX1 on the J5 breakout port. So with a bit of code writing it would seem in principle straightforwards to make this device simultaneously record both GPS data and CA data and write them into a single text file to the SD card. The fun you could have with that and google earth could be endless!

Justin

[MrKang]

And now we need some software programmers among us who can extract these log.txt into real onscreen display software
like Logview V2 . Anybody allready have a sollution for this ? Please share it with us to make a complete system!

[dak664]

Most spreadsheets will import comma-separated-values (.csv) text files and have wizards for making plots. Other separators can be specified in the import routines. I use the free http://www.openoffice.org.
You can paste new data into existing spreadsheets that have graphs and columns for cumulative amphours, charging efficiency, etc. Attached is the template I use for my headway packs.

[dak664]

By the way, http://elm-chan.org has a library for an embedded Fat32 file system with licensing

The FatFs module is a free software opened for education, research and development. You can use, modify and/or redistribute it for personal, non-profit use or commercial products without any restriction under your responsibility.

Particularly noteworthy is the MMC card reader example at http://elm-chan.org/fsw/ff/pfsample.zip which runs in the 8KB flash memory of an ATTiny85. All connections are direct, no additional components needed. Creating or extending a new file (probably) requires a 512 byte RAM buffer which is more than the Tiny has, but it is straightforward to rewrite sectors of existing files, by expanding a smaller binary buffer into ASCII on-the-fly.
The download has a 38.4KBaud serial interface, which I've replaced with an infrared RC5 routine for BMS logging. It has been running for a couple of weeks now with no problems, using 256MB and 4GB transflash cards. It draws 25 ma at 8MHz at 3.5 volts, probably could be cut to <10ma at a lower clock rate and voltage.

[MrKang]

thanks dak! i'm now downloading openoffice and try your template.
keep you updated with my experimenting with it