I did my first trial run on my car today.

Here we go: Picture

Since quality is less than peak (picasa jpegs everything), allow me to walk you through it. Also, excuse the dirty lil' temporary excel file. I plan on doing a better job.

So. Started driving home, i was already rolling when I remembered I wanted to do the record, so it starts out driving. As you can see from the red labels, negative X is accelerating, positive is braking.

As soon as I started recording, I got a good stretch of road, but it's cold and wet here do not too much. Still, I get a peak of 0.9G with a rebound 0.85 in between because of the rebound of the spring compression. Also, the device logs at about 10 samples per second (I timed it with a watch for 10 seconds, it did 104 samples).

Also, I averaged out the first ~30 samples or so (you can see it at the top) as I got going, averaging out 0.616G.

After that, you can see it drop to zero, as I shift then a test brake the some of the second gear and the the second test brake, this one quite strong, at 0.65G.

After that, there's constant acceleration with a constant 0.5G lateral force to the right (curve).

Then there's a flat part (I waited for some old car to get in trafic, with the added bonus of self-check), then the second gear, then normal driving (for me). I'm not the hold-coffee-on-dashboard driver.

Then, at the very end, on the left-right Y axis one can see a strong left-right balance as I climbed the front wheels on the side of the road (the Z accel also shows this, cropped in the image).

I'd say those are pretty good results. The only thing that is missing (aside from a decent GUI) is that the author of AccDisplay only logs X, Y, Z and no word on current time. Precise timing would be great for playback.

I plan on doing a GUI that shows car forces, a little animation perhaps and, of course, guessing car controls black-box like (user is pulling left, pulling right, etc).

Unfortunately, I'm a Windows guru, so any GUI will be Windows only. I would be happy to share any experience with anyone willing to port/rewrite this stuff. I have Linux guy lying around, I'll ask him if he'll write for Linux, maybe even Maemo.