Start-up problems

[Fred]

On naive start-up, dazzling success, crushing failure.

I apologize for the length of this post, but this is how it ended up when I included enough detail to describe what I see.

Before going to the track:

By some some unremembered sequence of operations, I managed to set new list to use the Lime Rock Add-in, name the car.

At the track:

At Lime Rock during a driving school session, I mounted iPhone 4 on rollbar with more or less standard Ram-mount stuff per instructions. Set Timer screen. Press 'Video' button. Drive about a 30 minute session. Return to pits. Press whatever button said something like 'Stop'. Go home and try to figure out what I had.

At home:

Press More... /Lap List. Lap List shows Harry's sample NordschleifeBTG files, along with stacks of garbage files I evidently generated pushing buttons trying to figure out how to run the app before I went and finally a promising looking set of Lime Rock files - embarrassingly long lap times, average speeds, inscrutable icons and time and date stamps. There was an icon representing a double-reel hand-crank movie camera marking a video for every other lap (cute.)

I pressed the right arrow on one of the video files. Pressed 'Overlay'. After a few minutes, a fully functional overlayed video appeared in my camera roll in the iPhone Camera app. It can be manipulated and exported like any other file there. Beautiful!

Picked another lap that hadn't been overlayed. Then pressed Export, selected the single lap file, turned all off except Text (.csv) and Google Earth (.kml). Pressed red 'Mail' button. Get flash screens that say something like "Creating export files" and "and forwarding to Mail." Fill my email address in To:. Hit 'Send.' Display returns to Lap Details.

Nothing in my Inbox. Nothing in Spam. No error or problem message.

Picked one of the laps that had no associated video. Same procedure. Same non-result.

Incidental tests:

Press 'Edit' on Lap Lists. Lime Rock header shows 7 POIs etc. Press right arrow on the header. One trigger at start/finish, all the rest are 'i' for information. Press 'Test.' A presentable track map with sensibly placed POIs is produced.

Conclusions so far:

In spite of my complete ignorance and bumbling, setup was good and the coherent overlayed video is evidence of valid data collected.

But now I need a clue about export.

TIA,
Fred Klingener

[Harry]

Hi Fred,

Thanks for your feedback. The export thing is pretty simple. It generates files as requested and generates a note in Mail app. Everything else is the same as if you send a 'handwritten' mail from your iPhone. So please check if your regular mail sending works. If not, this is the problem. In case this works, we need to check other potential sources for the issue.

Already posted one of the videos to youtube?

- Harry

[Fred]

Hi Harry,

Dazzling software, dazzling support.

You nailed this one right away. I rarely use iPhone's Mail app, preferring my normal web account. Some time ago I had to change my password to mobileme, and I failed to check function for all the apps that need it.

Export apparently works fine now.

Harry, this is a superb piece of software. The iPhone is a game-changer, and with people like you enabling mass access to its power, the world will never be the same.

I apologize for the nuisance problem, and thanks for the rapid response.

I probably won't post any of the videos from this batch on youtube, because the video quality is very poor. The vibration in the mount I think resonates with the vertical scan in the camera, producing a result that is perfectly adequate for me to dissect and compare laps, but I'd be afraid that people would conclude that there was some inherent limitation in the iPhone or in the Laptimer. I've seen some iPhone track video that's quite presentable, so I think if I experiment with the mounting it'll improve.

I plan to post a few samples for on a limited-access site. I'll send you a pointer.

This, as I said, was at a school, and there simply was no time to fiddle. If it didn't work absolutely seamlessly, it wasn't going to happen at all. It worked, it happened, and I'm just completely blown away.

Thanks, Harry.

--
Fred Klingener