Monday 5 March 2012

Drag Timer: The beginning

Sometime over a weekend in October 2011

Haseeb: Karizma has much better pickup!!
Balu: R15 has a better top-end and should take it in the drag.

After couple of drags(with distances assumed to be quarter mile) that Karizma won,

Haseeb: I told you so :)
Balu: You are underweight !!
Haseeb: Come on..how much can 10 kg weight make a difference??

Few more drags with bikes interchanged and concluding that karizma could be marginally faster, went for a post-drag analysis.

How can we measure our drag timings as our performances varied from one drag to another albeit by a small margin (0.5s though small is quite significant in end results).

VBOX was available in US and could be imported but costs as much as a bike !! So option ruled out.

Could play around with speedometer console to see if timer can be fit in like Apache. But required lot of electronics and mechanical knowledge.

Just then a flash that Vbox uses GPS for tracking and all our mobiles had GPS too !! So it must be a feasible solution. Software Development is anyways our bread and butter. So we started rolling ..

Along the way bought the services of our Android Expert, Shashi (by promising to relieve him from boring weekends ..ya by more of the same coding ;) )

PS: R15 is faster than Karizma over a quarter mile drag (Proved courtesy our Drag Timer ). Our initial drags weren't really 400m though we assumed it must be.