Overview
A low-cost track datalogger that turns a phone into a data acquisition device for the FSAE car — no dedicated logger hardware required. It’s a fork of the open-source mendhak/gpslogger Android app (Java, GPL-2.0), chosen as a base because it already does battery-efficient GPS logging to portable formats and has clean uploader plumbing.
Starting point
The upstream app logs GPS to GPX, KML, CSV, and NMEA, with auto-upload to SFTP,
Google Drive, Dropbox, OpenStreetMap, and email. Its architecture is built
around an event bus and a foreground GPSLoggingService that talks to the
location providers, drives the logging timers, and hands points to the loggers
and uploaders — a solid foundation to extend.
Adaptation for FSAE
The fork extends the base app in three directions:
- IMU capture — log the phone’s accelerometer and gyroscope alongside GPS so the trace carries lateral/longitudinal g and yaw, not just position.
- Chunked cloud upload — segment logs into short (~7-minute) chunks and push them to Google Drive during a session so data survives a mid-session crash and is available right after a run.
- Live visualization screens — an in-app dashboard with strip charts, a track map, and a G-G diagram for driver and engineering feedback between runs.
Notes
Licensed GPL-2.0, inheriting the upstream license.