[Dr J]

I've used several types of data acquisition systems for experiments in the past and had the same desire to collect data on the car, as you do. The problem with a generic data acq system is that you will want to monitor an o2 wideband sensor which requires a complicated input to activate it. With this in mind it would be worth looking at an innovate system.

I have the LM2 which reads the wideband o2, tach, and 4 analog inputs of 0-5V. So I also read timing advance and manifold pressure. In the future I wanted to add accelerometer data or devise a system to determine what gear I'm in. With some work I could develop something to get speed info but as you can see, I'm running out of inputs! Innovate uses a serial daisy chain system, so with some effort it might be possible to read these and have the lm2 log them as well.

Innovate also has other systems that log more data and even built-in accelerometers and add ons to track more channels.

Another useful capability is the ability to log your data and not need a computer on board. The innovate does this well with an SD card.

After collecting the data you want to analyze it and the innovate software is pretty good. If you have powerful data analysis software like matlab it would be good to have the data in some exportable text format. The innovate system lets you create a matrix table of any 3 values which I have exported into excel. I haven't tried to do much post processing with other software because I haven't really needed to do so.