Motorcycle App Helps You Ride Faster, Turn Sharper, Brake Harder 148
Hugh Pickens writes "Alexander George writes about a new app that takes the data from a smartphone's accelerometers, GPS, and inclinometer to plot information for braking force, lean angles, speed, and on-track location onto Google Maps to shave precious milliseconds off each lap time in motorcycle races. Race Sense is designed to be a useful tool for someone who races for a living and a very fun toy for those who just like to brag about what lean angle they got at their ride day, and what top speed they reached down the main straight. Australian Grand Prix motorcycle road racer Anthony West provided much of the R&D that went into tweaking the app. 'With sponsorship's so hard to find and I need another way to survive. I spent some of my own money developing it with an Italian guy who also likes to ride himself, and who writes programs,' says West who designed Race Sense to fulfill the needs of a genuine MotoGP racer. 'Sometimes it's one second [separating] 20 people. If you adjust one little thing thinking about something in one corner you can lose four places.'"
New evidence for speeding violations... coming up! (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Slashvertisement & Impending lawsuit (Score:5, Interesting)
Some of us quite like reading about interesting technology, especially those that ride motorcycles! It's also interesting to hear about lone developers working on things that were previously only in reach of professionals with large budgets i.e. race teams with money to spend. Oh, and of course theres a good healthy slice of physics involved too. Great stuff.
On another note, slashdot would be REALLY dull if it never mentioned products that you have to pay for! Of course if you don't like it, you can always filter your feed to only include open source stories and you'll be blissfully ignorant of the other stories...
Re:This will probably kill people. (Score:4, Interesting)
Right. You aren't looking at the device while riding. You look at it after putting in a few laps to see where you're losing time. You analyze the data, go back out to alter your braking point, acceleration point, etc, put in a few laps, and compare.