SDC Version 1.30 Release notes

Version 1.30 adds in the second phase of performance monitoring capabilities.

New Attributes

  • wheelshorsepower returns either a steady state or acceleration based horsepower value, depending on circumstances. It takes into account the amount of drag due to your current speed, the mass of the vehicle, its frontal area, the coefficient of drag, and the specified air density.
  • crankhorsepower returns the approximate crank horsepower based on the specified drivetrain losses.
  • wheelstorque returns the torque at the wheels based on the current wheel horsepower and the rpm.
  • cranktorque returns the torque at the crank based on the horsepower at the crank and the rpm.

Note that steady state horsepower (the horsepower required to maintain a constant speed) will be significantly different to acceleration horsepower. It requires surprisingly low horsepower figures to maintain a constant speed compared to the amount of work to do change from one speed to another.

The calculated figures do not take into account any headwinds you may be experiencing at the time of testing. The numbers are purely intended to be comparative. They can be used in conjunction with the new charting capabilities described in the sections below.

For these attributes to work you need a good VSS signal, and must have configured in several settings into the Performance ini file section

Gauges

The ChartGauge has a new “Theshold Mode” which enables the chart to be started and stopped automatically based on lower and upper limits. Once the chart has been triggered and completed, it must be reset via a touch action before it will run again.

To accomodate these new features, the ChartGauge has had the following properties added:

  • ActiveInitial - this specifies whether the chart should be active when it is initially created. This setting takes effect when the power is applied and SDC is booted.
  • AttributeAxis - this specifies an attribute to be used as the X axis when chart data is exported. For example, if you were charting wheelshorsepower then you would likely want to set AttributeAxis to rpm This is only relevant when the chart is in the new Threshold mode.
  • AttributeControl - this specifies the attribute to use for the Threshold values. For example, if you set this property to rpm then the Start and Stop theshold values specified will be RPM values.
  • AutoResetTimeoutSecs - this specifies the number of seconds after which the chart will be automatically reset. This is used in cases where the chart is triggered from the Start Threshold, but never reaches the Stop Threshold. For example, you tried to do a wide open throttle pull, but had to stop at a traffic light ;-)
  • GroupId - If non-zero, this places the chart into a group (where several other charts also have the same groupid). This enables one chart to be activated via a touch action, and all other charts in the group will be deactivated. The purpose behind this is to allow performance runs in threshold mode to have multiple charts displayable at the same time from previous power runs. It is up to the user how many charts to add to the group, which is done by adding multiple chart instances to the page.
  • MovingAverageCount - this setting enables any chart to be changed to a moving average. The count is the number of values to average over. This has the effect of smoothing out the chart line. The higher the number, the less peaky the chart will be, but it will take more samples for the chart to react to changes in the current value. Note that the moving average does not change the raw values written to disk. It only affects the display.
  • StartThreshold - this is the lower value used to specify the active range of the chart. In conjunction with the AttributeControl property, the value of the attribute specified by AttributeControl must be below the StartThreshold and then move above it for the chart to be triggered into an active state.
  • StopThreshold - this is the upper value used to specify the active range of the chart. The attribute specified by AttributeControl must be below and go above the StopThreshold in order for the chart to become inactive.
  • TimerId - this is the timer id of the chart. It is used to address this chart for certain touch actions such as resetting it after a performance run has been completed.
  • StepSize - this value defaults to 1 to keep the behaviour the same as previous releases, but if this is changed to a number greater than 1 then each line is drawn StepSize pixels further across the screen than the previous one. This can be used to make sure the number of samples captured between the start and end thresholds fill enough of the screeen width assigned to the chart. A sensible value will require a small amount of experimentation, as the number of samples taken can vary depending upon the speed of the data source being used.

Chart data can now be saved to a disk file using a new touch action SAVECHARTDATA=<timerid>

Other

A new web server location /rawdata has been added which enables access to the raw data files saved by the ChartGauge (when requested by a touch action).

The SDC tools application now provides an attribute picklist for any property that contains the word ‘Attribute’, due to some gauges now having more than one possible attribute property.

Upgrading from 1.20

To perform an upgrade of just the binary and any other updated files, you can download the upgrade zip file, extract it to a temporary folder, and use the SDC Tools ‘Software Update’ feature.