How to create a track and reference lap for a road rally

[devenh]

I've posted a couple of threads about using HLT for a road rally. The links below to these threads will explain in more detail what a rally (or road race) is, but very briefly here is a recap. A road race is held on a public road that is closed, usually quite long (e.g. 90 miles), and very fast (100mph+). These are typically timed events, so your goal as a driver is to finish in exactly 50 minutes (or whatever). To place on the podium, you'll probably have to finish within one second to your target time. Experienced drivers are finishing withing 1/10th of a second.

HLT can be very useful in these events, but, it is difficult to create a track the usual way with HLT. And it is impossible to create a reference lap unless you've driven in the event before, and even this may not be useful because you may drive in a different speed class in subsequent years. The goal of this exercise is to create a reference lap that when, you drive the actual event, will guide you through the race to finish at your target time.

Here are some past links:

HLT Rally Results:
viewtopic.php?f=9&t=1631

Rally configuration:
viewtopic.php?f=9&t=1627

iPhone & GPS Time:
viewtopic.php?f=9&t=1627

iPad & XPS150 issues:
viewtopic.php?f=9&t=1621

I'd like the focus of this thread to be how to create a virtual track and reference lap. This is not an easy process. It will take patience, very good spreadsheet skills, familiarity with XML and gzip. There are a lot of moving parts and things will go wrong. You will want to practice to make sure everything works. I will probably make mistakes while explaining what to do since I don't use this technique very often. I am also very busy right now and traveling, so there may be times when I am slow to respond.

I use Windows 8 and OpenOffice. I will convert the spreadsheet to Excel, but the source will be OO.

Since there are so many steps, I will post separate posts for each step. I won't post the spreadsheet until we complete the first few step.

The more responses I get from these posts, the more time I'll devote to this thread. If I don't hear much, I'll assume there is not much interest.

Even if you have no plans to participate in a rally, the information contained in this thread will give you insights as to how HLT works. This can be useful to backing up tracks and reference laps or going in and changing tracks and/or reference laps.

So I'm out of time right now. My next post will lay out all the steps involved.

Deven

[devenh]

Ok, let's get started!

We'll use as an example the Silver State Challenge Classic which is an open road race in eastern Nevada, USA. See sscc.us for complete information.

Here are some of the skills you'll need to know in order to create a reference lap:

1. Ability to define a route in maps.google.com and export the GPS coordinates to a spreadsheet. For this, we'll use gpsvisualizer.com. This is a very important resource.

2. Ability to import and export tracks and reference laps from HLT. This will require some XML knowledge and zipping and unzipping files.

3. Now it is time to combine the above and create a reference lap in a spreadsheet and send the resulting XML file to HLT.

4. Testing the results.

[devenh]

Let's create a set of GPS coordinates that will define the "track" and reference lap.

The Silver State Challenge Classic (SSCC) is the route we'll create. Here is the route map:

http://sscc.us/course_notes_map.aspx

This page conveniently provides the GPS coordinates for the start and finish. Let's assume we don't have these. Instead, we look at the map and see it goes essentially from Lund, NV to Hiko, NV. Enter these towns into Google maps and create a route or directions.

Now open a new web page and go to gpsvisualizer.com. The site can be a little intimidating with all the choices, but I'll try to walk you through it.

Click on the "Look up elevations" link. There you'll see and input box labeled "Or provide a URL." You'll want to enter the URL from the map you created on google.com (you didn't close this page, right?). Copy the URL from the Google maps page into the gpsvisualizer.com field. Select output to plain text. Now click "Convert & add elevation."

Now you should see a list of the GPS coordinates that will form the basis of our reference lap.

If you are lucky enough to have the GPS coordinates for the start and finish you can do things a bit differently.

GPS Coordinates
START: N38.49.900 W115.00.652 (38.831667 -115.010867)

FINISH: N37.37.700 W115.13.179 (37.628333 -115.21965)

You can enter these coordinates into Google maps directly. Enter the coordinates in the parentheses. If you look carefully at the starting point of the map, you'll see that Google is putting you on a side dirt road, which is wrong, therefore the starting coordinates are wrong. Oops! This is why I would always recommend double checking the starting and finishing coordinates.

If it is not practical to go to the starting location and get the coordinates, you can do the next best thing and go there through Google Maps street view. Go back to the map page and drag the starting location to Highway 318. Next go to street view. Can you find the blue starting line by "walking" north or south? If not, you'll find it at 38.83703,-115.01066.

Once you have the route defined using GPS coordinates, you can copy the Google URL into gpsvisualizer.com and get the waypoints that define the route.

If you can't determine the exact start and finish coordinates before the event, just be sure to define a route that you are sure encompasses both the start and the finish. When it comes time to do the event, I assume you will have a chance to preview the course. At this time you can get the exact coordinates and enter these into the spreadsheet, but that is several steps away.

Okay, that is all for now. It may be a few days until I have time to describe the next steps. Feel free to post questions about anything I've described so far.

Deven

[NickeyZL1001]

Deven:

You have my interest. I just competed for the first time and it was a comedy of errors on the technical side, which I will explain later. The important thing is that we learned a lot. What we ended up doing is looking at the elapsed time per mile marker.

Now my list of errors:
1. HTL didn't sense the starting line, so we had to manually hit the record button
2. At some point, our external GPS lost connection, so I don't have a reference lap
3. Additionally, we lost our connection with the GoPro so the only video I have is from the iPad, which was positioned for the navigator to se, so the camera was facing the gear shifter.

Anyway, I have the spreadsheet with lat and longitude. Now hoping I can import a reference lap and assuming that I can change the formulas for the different speed we will do in September.

Thanks. I really think HTL can be helpful, but obviously, its not a simple load the track, enter your average speed and then hit start.

With that said, anyone found the GoPoint OBDII yet?

[NickeyZL1001]

Deven:
You and Harry are certainly in a different league than I, but I am doing my best to learn and follow.
I have attached my results so far. I did my best to follow your directions, but I will be honest, what I saw and what the directions stated differed. So either things have changed, or I did them wrong, or I found another route.

1. http://www.gpsvisualizer.com
2. Click on Google Maps Icon http://www.gpsvisualizer.com/map_input?form=google
3. Click on Google Earth KML/KMZ icon
4. Paste GOOGLE MAPS URL in "Or provide the URL of static data on the Web:" which was: https://www.google.com/maps/dir/'38.837 ... .62765!3e0
4. Add DEM elevation data" field to "From best available source.
5. Click Create KML file
6. Cut and Paste into excel

Geez I can hardly wait for the next step.

[devenh]

Had hoped to be able to post some new information by now, but have been quite busy. Will be back the week of July 7.

[devenh]

Just 39 days until my next road rally, so I'll be spending a lot of time with HLT ...

I reviewed my May 30 post and see that gpsvisualizer.com has changed some of its pages, so I edited that posting to bring it up to date.

So now we need to explore how tracks and laps work in HLT. Basically what we are going to do is define a track and create a reference lap. The track is the road rally course and the reference lap will be how fast we want to drive the course.

While the goal of the rally is to drive the course at an exact target average speed, you may drive above or below this average speed (within limits) as course conditions permit. With the spreadsheet I'll describe in a subsequent post, one can enter the expected speeds throughout the course and compute the overall average speed. This process will result in the reference lap and be used during the rally to show whether you are on pace, behind pace, or ahead of pace.

HLT uses the XML file format for tracks and laps. It is beyond the scope of this tutorial to explain what XML is, but there are plenty of explanations on the web.

To retrieve HLT track and lap files, one has to use HLT to email them to oneself. The files are sent in compressed from, so once received they have to be uncompressed. Sending track and lap back to HLT is basically the same process in reverse.

In my next post I'll describe how this works.

Deven

[devenh]

The following steps that describe how to download lap data from HLT may be skipped as they are not necessary for creating a reference lap, but you probably want to go through them just to become more familiar with how HLT works.

I'll assume you have a track and some laps stored on HLT.

1. Open HLT v18.2 or above and go to the "Lap list" page

2. Click on a lap and scroll to the bottom of the page

3. Click on Export

4. Click on a lap # under Lap and Type Selection (the far right button)

5. Click on .hlptrl (this extension is really just an .xml file)

6. Click on Mail

7. Enter your email address and send

When you receive the email, place the attachment into a folder. The folder can have any name, but I will use HLT\gzip. I typically rename the file XxxxxLap.hpltrz, where Xxxxx is the course name.

The next step is to uncompress the file. Since I am a Windows user, the following will be Windows based. I know little about Apple PCs, so maybe someone else can pipe in.

In my HLT directory I created a subdirectory named xml. We'll uncompress the file in the gzip directory to the xml directory. I use a program called 7za (7-zip.org). Be sure to install this in the Windows search PATH (Didn't I warn that this was going to be geeky?). The easiest way to do this is to be sure 7za.exe is in the c:\Windows directory.

1. Open the Windows command prompt (hint: Start button, search "Cmd")

2. Change your directory to \HLT\xml (you'll probably have to specify the drive letter)

3. Enter the command "7za e -tgzip ..\gzip\XxxxxLap.hlptrz"

4. You should now have a file in the xml directory XxxxxLap. Rename it to XxxxxLap.xml.

You may now open the file in a text editor to view it. I use Notepad++ (notepad-plus-plus.org). What you see is an example of the kinds of files we'll have to create and send back to HLT in order to create our own track and reference lap. We'll go into more detail about this file later. Next we'll download a track.

Deven

[Harry]

On a Mac (and a Windows system with 7zip installed), just rename X.hlptrz to X.hlptrl.gz and double click it.

- Harry

[devenh]

On a Mac (and a Windows system with 7zip installed), just rename X.hlptrz to X.hlptrl.gz and double click it.

Thanks for the tip!

In my examples I'll continue to use the command line version because this lends itself to Windows batch files which I'll use later to automate the upload process. Plus I'm an old school DOS guy who loves the command line

I agree that the use of the command line here adds a bit of work, but one is rarely downloading data from HTL. As we'll see later, there is a lot of trial and error when creating a track and lap and thus a lot more time is spent uploading to HTL.

Another point to make is that there are many ways to accomplish some of the steps I'll describe. Everyone should feel free to explore alternative techniques.

Deven