The Racing Geek

I was recently at the WOM World get-together in SF when we started discussing the some of the ways that Nokia should market the N-series devices, specifically the N95 vs iPhone issue. One of the things we all agreed on was that the camera on the N95 is a huge differentiator that Nokia really hasn’t been pushing as much as it should. People are so used to seeing crappy photos from devices like the Razr and the iPhone that they dont expect phones to have good cameras. I, on the other hand, have been using various variants of the N95 for well over a year and the camera is so good that I can honestly say that I will never buy a point-and-shoot camera again. People who see the shots are blown away by the quality of the images and often wont believe that they are from a cameraphone. Additionally the fact that I can use ZoneTag to upload, tag and geotag photos directly from the phone means that I upload way more photos from my phone than I ever did with my point-and-shoot camera.

So anyway, I had a quick look at some of the photos I’ve taken over the last year and have pulled out a few of the really outstanding shots to demonstrate the quality of the N95 camera - hope you like them.

One of the first really great shots I took with the phone was this shot of the wreck of the Peter Iredale of the coast of Oregon. I took a bunch of photos of the wreck but I particularly like the contrasting colours in this picture. You can also see that the photo has been automatically geotagged using ZoneTag which allowed me to do 2-click upload the photo while on vacation while also suggesting the tags “shipwreck” and “beach”.

In case you have any doubts about the print quality of the images you should check out this photo of mine that was used in a full page advertisement in SportsCar magazine. The photo was taken with an N95 classic after I spun out at the track.

One of the things that people forget is that not only does the N95 take great photos but it also shoots 640×480 video at a full 30 fps. The above video was taken at a BMW club autocross using an N95 8GB (N95-2) on my homebrew track video setup. As you can see the picture is clear and skip free. The loud rustling sound is the wind noise from the air entering the cabin once you go above a certain speed. Also check out this trackday video that I made at Reno-Fernley Raceway using the same camera setup.

The two photos above are part of a set that I took from the front row of an Iron Maiden concert in San Antonio using my N95 classic. The concert environment with its combination low light, moving subjects, backlighting and audience jostling is pretty hostile to cameras and makes it super challenging to take clear photographs.

The biggest issue for me was the time it takes for the N95 camera to both switch on and also focus on its subject. I would often click the button to capture an interesting moment but the moment would be well past by the time the camera actually took its shot. I took about 150 photos on that day and roughly 40 were worth putting on Flickr with another 40-50 worth saving. Not a very good ratio but since people were having worse ratios with high-ish end cameras I certainly cant complain. Also being a cameraphone means that there are zero questions asked when you take it into the venue

The last thing I want to share is some video that I shot from another Iron Maiden Concert (this time in Concord). This was from an N95 8GB NAM and as you can see the video is pretty damn good despite the tough camera conditions. The sound is once again the biggest issue - it just cant handle the loud noise and ends up clipping most of the audio.

All in all I can say that the N95 has a truly spectacular camera (for a phone) and it can easily be a replacement for a point-and-shoot camera. Plus if Nokia can fix the sound/clipping problems on the phone they should seriously market the N95 as a full-on camcorder replacement as well. The addition of easy uploads to Flickr and YouTube (the current Flickr share SUCKS!!!) would make this the perfect point-and-shoot photo and video capture device.

Craig from Group of Fools (Car #9) contacted me a few days ago saying that he had some on-track video from his car that included our car and asked me if I’d like a copy. After being deafened by my “Hell YES!!” he mailed me a DVD with a 10 minute video clip of their car following us around the track.

The following video merges 3 video streams for your viewing pleasure. The top and bottom camera views are from our car (#56 White BMW with a wing)). The camera in the center is from Group of Foolz (#9 Maroon BMW with a baby seat on the top). The video starts with me coming out of the pits to start my Saturday stint and by the 40 second mark you can see the #9 car right on my rear bumper. They then follow us around the track as we both go through slower traffic until they finally pit after about 10 minutes.

Major thanks to both #9 Group of Foolz for sending me the video and ChaseCam for giving us the video setup we used in our car.

3 camera action from the 24 Hours of Lemons from rnair on Vimeo.

#56 SFF1 (us)

#9 Group of Foolz (with baby seat :-))

Our tactics for the race were to run 45 minute stints at a healthy pace and to avoid any unnecessary contact. Guy was our first driver and got to experience the Lemons start procedure. All the teams are asked to lineup in the pits and are slowly let out onto the track for yellow flag laps. Once the whole grid is on the track, race control randomly picks a team and throws the green flag the next time that team crosses the start/finish. At this point the race is on and its every man for himself. This is a short video of the start of the race - Guy enters the frame from the left at the 40 second mark.

Race start from rnair on Vimeo.

We were keeping up an excellent pace and were among the faster cars out there. Our pitstops, while not spectacular, were decent enough and saw Rob and Jyri taking stints 2 and 3 respectively. About 2 hours into the race, Jyri pitted and I got into the car for stint #4.

I started out pretty tentatively, this was after all my very first race in a real car. On lap 2 I started to feel really brave and tried to pass a couple of cars around the outside of the banking. While I did end up going around the cars, I was unsighted going into the esses and found that someone had dragged quite bit of gravel right at my braking/turn-in point. This being Lemons there was no debris flag and I basically had two choices: a) squeeze the car on my left and attempt to avoid the gravel with the possibility of getting broadsided if it doesn’t work out and b) hit the freestanding tire barrier and hope for the best. Having seen other cars hit similar barriers without too much drama, I decided on option b and hit the brakes which locked the second I hit the gravel.

Debris flag anyone? from rnair on Vimeo.

As you can see I hit the barrier with a glancing blow and knocked them over. You probably also saw that there was a third option available - turn right, avoid the barrier and skip the esses. Unfortunately I didn’t think of it at the time so that route really didn’t come into play. After the it the car seemed to be working fine and after slowing for a few corners I continued on my merry way. The following clip should give you a good idea of the action we encountered on track. Watch the grey Subaru wagon (Team Scooby) as it tries to pass me, it was one of the fastest cars on the track but I kept getting him stuck behind slower cars until he finally passes me two laps later

On track action from rnair on Vimeo.

About 30 minutes into the session I came around the banking and was about to pass another car when the back end of the car suddenly let go and spun me around. Luckily the car missed the tire barriers and ended up facing the wrong way on the inside of the first S. I tried putting it in neutral to start the engine but the gearshift had sunk about 6 inches lowers and I could not change gears. I tried starting it with the clutch in but only got an loud banging noise from the transmission with no forward movement. I then sat around waiting for the tow truck and watched cars coming head-on towards me at race speed - I even had one guy blow the turn and drive across the front of my car. After a few minutes the race was yellow flagged and the tow truck pushed me into the pits with the transmission making loud banging noises all the way.

Spin out from rnair on Vimeo.

When I came into the pits, we got down to diagnosing what was wrong with the car - the transmission was obviously busted but we didn’t know how or why. When we opened the hood we saw a most interesting sight, the radiator was bent outwards rather than inwards. It appeared that when our car had any forward contact (such as the tire barrier I hit), the engine was actually flexing the engine mounts and moving far enough forward in the engine bay for the distributor to hit the back of the radiator. This motion kept pulling the transmission forward until the transmission mounts finally snapped. At this point the transmission stressed the driveshaft enough that the two piece driveshaft just separated at the joint. /the driveshaft snapping was most likely the cause of the spin - it was equivalent to lifting mid corner which produced lift-off oversteer with no drive to allow recovery. Our car was now officially dead and we did not have any spare parts to fix it.

Enter our in-team mechanic: Rob Dietsch of Dietsch Werks. Now Rob usually spends his days doing high quality repair work on his customers cars, this obviously was NOT the time for quality work so he settled for quick and dirty fixes (emphasis on quick :-)). He started out by removing the two pieces of the driveshaft and used a hacksaw to clean out the joint between the two pieces before mating them together once again. We did not have any spare transmission mounts so he fixed the transmission in place using straps and bolts passing through holes drilled in the car floor. The final piece was to anchor the engine in place using chains so that it would no longer move forward if there was any impact.

The repairs took about 2.5 hours and dropped us to 62 place in the standings. Rob took the car out first to see how it would hold up. He put in some good times before handing it over to Jyri for the final stint. By the end of the day the car had suffered only minor body damage and was still putting in some excellent times. We were just glad to be running at the end of the day despite having such potentially race ending damage to our drivetrain.

P.S.: If you have nothing better to do and want to kill a full 30 minutes you should watch this video of my entire stint.

Saturday stint from rnair on Vimeo.

Some in-car video from yesterdays GGLC autocross in Marina.

The first video is my fast lap for the day. I don’t slow enough after the slalom and understeer into a cone. I still end up doing a 40.1 (+1).

Fast lap from rnair on Vimeo.

The second video is from my last run of the day where I am sideways on at least 3 occasions. It was a slow run (41.6), but great fun nonetheless

A very sideways lap from rnair on Vimeo.

The last video is Nithyas best run (46.5) of the day in the GTI. For someone who almost backed out of her first event, she is becoming very good at this. If you have never tried autocrossing you should come down to one of the GGLC events next season and give it a try - it is safe, fun and the best way to learn car control.

Nithya Fast Lap from rnair on Vimeo.

Question: Which Lemons team was using the same technology as Formula 1 teams?
Answer: Team SFF1 was using the same ChaseCam setup used by Formula 1 teams like Renault and Red Bull.

As I’ve said before, the ChaseCam PDR100 Racer Kit is my dream in-car video setup - a solid state video recorder with a lightweight, shockproof, weatherproof camera. When we decided to run the 24 Hours of Lemons I approached ChaseCam to see if they might be interested in lending us a video setup to record the race. I am glad to report that they were very interested in the race and sent us a two full recording setups (PDR 100, bulletcam and camera mount) so that we’d be able to record both forward and backward views.

We mounted the cameras to the rollcage and velcroed the PDR units to the area where the back seats used to be. To avoid having to change batteries every stint, we directly hard wired the units to a 12V line from the dashboard. Once the cameras were aimed all we had to do was pop in a couple of 8GB video cards and we were ready to go. We are still sifting through the recorded video but here is a quick teaser from our rear facing camera. Jyri was driving the car when he gets hit while going through the esses. He recovers well from the hit but a few seconds later he gets hit again while going through the right handed sweeper and goes into the tirewall. Incidentally the blue CRX that passes us in the beginning of the video is Team Blue Goose, a team of EliseTalkers from Texas who finished 8th.

Ouch from rnair on Vimeo.

At its highest quality setting, the PDR100 records MPEG-2 at the rate of 4GB an hour. This meant that at every pitstop we had to switch CF cards and download the card data onto a laptop. The only issue we ran into was that the maximum file size on the PDR is 4GB (irrespective of card size) which means that in high quality mode you can only record 1 hour of video. If you are going to be recording video of greater length I suggest you reduce the quality to “normal”. Now if you’ll excuse me I have some 50 GB of super high quality video to sift through.

P.S.: I am in the process of writing up our entry for the December race so it will probably be a week or so before I recap the race and post the video online.

Update from Randy Chase: “The largest single file size is 4gigs but it can record continuously using consecutive 4gig files. For example, a 16gig card will record 4 hours of the highest quality video, but in 4 files. A 32gig card will record 8 hours. The gap between files is less than 1/2 second.” The PDR100 is now officially perfect.

We finished 44th out of 85 cars (full results). Our pace was really good but we lost a lot of time (3+ hours) due to some mechanical issues. I’ll be writing up more detail of how the race went and our band-aid mechanical fixes over the next few days. In the meantime here is some video of the race start.

Race start from rnair on Vimeo.

Yesterday we had a pretty good test day at Altamont. All of us did a few laps behind the wheel to get a feel for the car and the track. The car ran very fast and we all did 54 sec laps with Jyri doing a best of 52. We did have some tire wear issues with our right front tire due to the long banked turns - we will be doing some emergency camber adjustments to the front to fix that.

Here is a photo of me passing someone on the outside of the banking and a video of Jyri doing some quick laps under lights.

Hot laps from rnair on Vimeo.

Day three of car prep was all about getting the engine running. At this point we had had the car with us for several months but we hadn’t yet heard the damn thing run.

We started up by tightening up the head bolts and putting in a new timing belt. After that we adjusted the valve spacing (space between camshaft and valve stem) and began reconnecting that various fuel hoses and wires. We decided not to put the cooling system in until the engine was in running condition to give ourselves some work room in case we needed to replace any additional parts. After everything was connected back up we added some more oil to the engine and started it for the first time.

It’s Alive from rnair on Vimeo.

After sorting out some initial issues with some blown fuses, the car started on just the second attempt. The cloud of smoke on the side was a combination of an untightened exhaust manifold and some oil burning off. After this major success we decided to wrap up the day and were actually able to drive the car outside to park it. It still doesn’t have a cooling system so we havent run it for any length of time but the fact that it moves under its own power and doesn’t make any weird noises is a great sign.

Baby steps from rnair on Vimeo.

Lap of Reno-Fernley Raceway (Nokia N95) from rnair on Vimeo

I finally got around to editing and uploading some of the video* I recorded during my last trackday. This was the first time I was using the Nokia N95 and I had high expectations from the high-rez camera. As you can see over here the video quality is dramatically better than my past recordings from the N73. I have been planning on getting a ChaseCam PDR setup for a while but now that I can get such excellent video from the phone I think I will stick to my homebrew cellphone setup. There are still some issues with vibration on the high speed straights but I am confident that I can fix that adding a layer of padding (tissue/cloth) to the phone before taping it to the car.

*This video is only to show quality of the recording - the driving still needs some work

Update: The Internet Video Call application described in this post has been discontinued by Nokia and does not work any more. To do a video chat on the N800 please read my new tutorial on how to video chat using the Gizmo Project.

I recently attended Mobile Mashup 2007 and was thrilled to find that all attendees were being given an N800 Internet Tablet. I have been following the hype on the N800 for a while and while most people have been raving about it being the ultimate rss reader and the perfect coffee table web browser, I have intrigued by the video chat possibilities. Though voice and video chat are now supported by most of the major IM clients, the fact that it requires a computer, webcam and a headset means that you are pretty much anchored to one spot during the call - sure you could theoretically carry a laptop around the house but that’s too cumbersome to be done with any regularity. The N800 however comes with integrated speakers, mike, (VGA?) camera and WiFi which makes it the perfect untethered video chat appliance - in theory.

In practice I found that the N800 has a truly ridiculous user interface that does not adhere to any known UI standards. People will justify it by saying that it is running Linux and has an “expert” user interface (aka whatever the implementer felt was good), but that is no excuse for Nokia releasing it in its current state. If you are marketing a device to end users you have to make the software completely idiot proof. Sure I could download the source and make the modifications myself but the fact is that when I want to make a call all I want to do is talk to the other person - recompling linux is not an acceptable step during the calling process. Anyway, after about 3-4 hours of fiddling with the various options I was finally able to get the video chat to work and was quite impressed with the results. The audio quality is excellent and doesn’t have much lag. The video reception (see picture below) is pretty good though it is fairly low resolution. Remote users said that the camera on the N800 did not deal well with differential lighting/backlit conditions but that’s pretty much par for the course on a webcam. I was able to make video calls to friends in the US as well as to my parents in India (PC software is Windows only, Mac and Linux users are on their own). It’s pretty cool to be able to walk around the house while video chatting without worrying about power, network, camera, headset, etc… The fact that the screen and the camera are so close to each other means that the line of sight problem is minimized as well. The experience is similar to what I expect cellphone video calls to be like - if they were actually cheap enough to make.

Since a bunch of us at the lab have this device we have been playing around with using it almost like the media spaces project. Shane and I sat at different ends of the room during the CHI Sampler and left the video channel open throughout (audio muted). It was quite interesting to be able to see other people reactions to the talks. Since there was no audio we had use an improvised sign language to communicate until Ayman came up with the idea of typing messages on your cellphone and then holding the phone screen up to the webcam. We also tried setting our devices to so both cameras would point to the speaker so we could see different points of view on a single talk. I don’t think this is something you will do often, but I can see it being a useful backchannel when non-colocated people are working together. The fact that it is a separate device makes it feel more like a real communication channel than the webcam window on a PC IM client.

N800 Video call tutorial

Now for the truly useful part of this post - a step by step tutorial on setting up video chat so that future buyers wont end up pulling their hair out. If you are not sure about what buttons I am referring to please click through onto the image above, I have marked out the important icons using Flickr notes.

Update the OS

Download the software update utility from Nokia and update the OS. The newest version of the OS is more stable than the one the N800 ships with. Dont forget to back up any existing data before the update.

Setup the WiFi

To make an internet video call you first need the internet, if you haven’t set it up during your first boot just follow these steps.

1. Open the “Control Panel” from Start Button (the button on the left that has two window icons on it) -> Tools -> Control Panel
2. Open the Connectivity application and click the “Connections” button
3. Click “New” to open the connection setup wizard and then tap “Next” to continue
4. Name the connection, set the connection type to “WLAN” and tap next
5. You will get dialog asking “Scan for available WLAN networks?”. Tap Yes
6. You will now be presented with a list of available networks. Just select the one you want to connect to and tap next. You will be prompted to enter the network WEP key if the network is protected.
7. Tap “Finish” to save you new internet settings

Setup a Google Talk/Jabber account

In order to invite someone to start a video/voice chat with you you need to make them a contact. The easiest way to do this is to sign into an existing Google talk account since all that needs is a Gmail account and password.

1. First go back to the control panel and open the “Accounts” application.
2. Hit “New” to create a new account. Hit next once the Account Setup wizard opens.
3. Select “Google Talk” as the service and tap Next. You should theoretically be able to do the same with any Jabber account but I have not tried this and YMMV.
4. If you have an existing Google Talk account select that option or else select “create new account”. Tap Next to continue.
5. Enter your username and passowrd before tapping Next.
6. Hit “Finish” to complete account setup.
7. If your account was setup correctly you should see a green ball icon to the right of the bluetooth icon on the status bar (top right of the screen).

Send call invitation

This is the step where you actually invite someone (on either a Windows PC or another N800) to join you in an internet call

1. Start by opening the camera on the tablet. It is the little circle on the left edge of the tablet when you are looking at the screen. Push the circle with your finger and the camera should pop out. The internet call application will also open but you can close it for now.
2. Click on the “Communication” icon on the left taskbar. It looks similar to the tray icon for MSN messenger and looks like two figures in pink and purple.
3. Select “Send call invitation” from the menu.
4. A dialog box will pop up asking you what name you want to use for you internet calls. Type in whatever screen name you would like to use.
5. This will open a window asking how you want to send the invite. Select the “Send invitation via chat” option and tap “Ok”
6. This will open the Instant Messaging application and will display a window asking you to “Select contact for invitation”. Select the contact you want to invite and tap “Ok”
7. The IM application will open a chat window and send the other person a message saying “XXXX is inviting you to star an Internet video call (voice-only calling also supported). Click the following link for further instructions”.
8. If the person you are calling has an N800 then they will get directly get an incoming call dialog which they can answer to start the call.
9. If the remote person is on a Windows PC they should click on the which will take them to a page that looks like this. If the initial link was valid (it should have some url parameters) the “Install Software” button on the page will be in colour.
10. When the remote user clicks on that button the user will be prompted to install the Nokia Internet call software. It is a 11 MB download and have the usual install screens, the user can just keept hitting next
11. Once the software is installed, the remote user should go back to the initial install page and click the “Add contact” button at the bottom of the second column. This button only appears on valid pages (it will not appear on the link on step 9) and only if the downloaded software is correctly installed.
12. Once the remote user had clicked the “Add contact” button you should get an authorization request on the tablet. There will be an audio notification and the “Communication” button in the left taskbar will change colour to red and green. You can authorize the request by tapping the button and then selecting “Authorize XXX” option. You can also add the remote user as a contact by selecting the “Add XXX” option.
13. Once the authorization is done you should get an “Incoming call” notification. Once you select the green telephone icon it will open an internet call between the you and the remote contact. If both users have a webcam it will have a video channel or else it will be a voice only call.

Once you have actually set up you first call everything else should go pretty smoothly. If you want to call someone you have spoken to before just open the Internet call application and pick them out of the recent calls list. The software does not show if a person currently has video call capability so you may occasionally find that someone who has switched to another PC may have to go through another invite/install process. The call application is a bit buggy and sometimes will not make outgoing call (you get an error message saying “unable to connect”), in this try asking the remote user to call you - that seems to always work for me. One last point is that because the internet call and IM clients are different applications you cannot see both screen at the same time making this a either a pure audio/video chat or a pure text chat - it isn’t too much of a loss because the text entry using the stylus is soooooo slow that you very quickly give up on the text chat.
If this has gotten you interested and you want to buy an N800 just head on over to the Nokia site.