04/25/2026
I love drag racing. It's pretty cool to boil down the performance / racing problem to "how much power can I apply, how soon, and for how long". You get to also avoid the complexities of other types of racing and just focus on the core thing of how you get a big chunk of mass from one point to another as quickly as possible.
Over the years I've seen a lot of *really* smart people, do *really* smart things with less than ideal tech.
You know what I'm talking about. Yeah *you*. I'm talking about using timers as the backbone of control strategies for drag racing.
It's 2026. You can use an Obsidian INS and add or remove power based on distance.
What's notable here about these two logs (that you're probably trying to squint at on your phone) is that the Speed, Distance, and Time are all generated *automatically, without a start trigger* from an Obsidian INS.
I did a little math here to calculate the errors from the time slips (from the track) after accounting for a rollout distance of 12". Two different runs with a max total deviation of +27.5ms to -19ms [milliseconds]. I even suspect that there is a way to improve that accuracy, but more on that later.
You may notice here that I'm calculating the split times here (see `ins_x_time`) in MoTeC i2. However, there's good news for you since you made it this far. As of INS Version 60, you will now be able to receive these split times and speeds and have a user configurable rollout distance.
So, go drag race, get an INS, do something sporty with it! Thanks for the data and slips !
