Harry's Lap Timer: Review

[e30Racer]

Good afternoon time trial'ers!!! TGPR TT School is almost upon us. I will be a student this year so I started browsing for a cost effective way to keep track of my lap times for each session. Since this is going to be my first year, I have already spent a lot of money getting the car prepared and up to snuf according to the technical regs. There are many fantastic data loggers available with lots of customization, predictive lap times, etc. But $300 to $400 even on the low end is just too much for me right now.

Enter my iPhone!!! I have used my iPhone 3G during autox's using an app called g-tac pro. I mostly use it just to compare runs including things like top speed, lateral g's, and such. It doesn't do timing as it starts and stops when I press the button. This app has a lap function, but having messed around with it, the ability of the app to consistently trigger a new lap at some designated start point is very inspiring.

So....I googled, and found this app thats called Harry's Lap Timer. Sounded a bit shaddy at first, but as I looked at the summary, it looked pretty decent. Reviews have been pretty good from what I found and for $5.99, its worth a shot!!! Here's the website for anyone interested. http://web.me.com/hschlangmann/LapTi...page/Home.html

It has a lot of addons you can get, some free, some for a price. My favorite part is that you can download track maps and use it when at that track. If you are at a place that doesn't already have a track map, you can set a predefined start/finish point. Well as I as scrolling through the possible track maps, low and behold, it actually has TGPR!!! As well as all the other track around here in the southeast such as Barber, Road Atlanta, CMP, Roebling, etc.

So what are some of the setbacks/cons from first glance? Well the major drawback is the iPhone itself. The internal gps has a 1Hz refresh rate. I have not looked to see if there are any external gps receivers for the iPhone, but that might be an easy fix for higher resolution and accuracy.

I'll see how it works this weekend and give a post-weekend update for anyone maybe wanting to try this out as well.

[TouringBubble]

QStarz has a few 5hz and 10h bluetoothe GPS devices at affordable prices. These work with the app I use on Android, Trackmaster. I do not know if the iPhone logger supports the higher refresh rates.

It's good to know that there is an iPhone option for this stuff. I've been looking for better hardware to run TrackMaster on as my phone has a mega sensitive accelerometer and isn't very accurate in that respect. Katie now has an iPod Touch. If this app is as good as TrackMaster, I may swap platforms.

Also, for what it's worth, a 1hz interpolated signal should be fine for most road racing. 5hz is basically a must for autocross though.

[nicktcr]

Not gonna lie, technology is cool.

[e30Racer]

Well unfortunately my review is going to be short....

I could not get the timer to work

I didn't have time to mess with it last week and see what different settings do and how it needed to be configured. I was hoping for just a "plug'n'play" style app that I could turn on and go. I downloaded the TGPR map, and set it to use as the "trigger point". It was supposed to already have the start/finish line marked, but when I was running during my sessions, it didn't work.

I did have a very good signal and was getting speed, acceleration, blah blah so the gps was working well. There are different settings for the "trigger point" but I didn't really have time to mess with it. The other difficult part was that I couldn't mess with it while in the car bc my iPhone won't read my finger input with gloves on. So I think I will try it out on the street and give it another shot at the next event.

I think I should be able to get it to work for autox as well bc you can set multiple trigger points and have them do different things like, start, stop, start/stop, etc. So I think I should be able to set one point as the start, and one point as the finish, and see if it works. Messing with it at autox will be more environmentally friendly with a quick run, and then back to grid to see if it worked or not.

If anyone elses tries this out, please feel free to post up your experiences