Recording your rides with Track Addict
Track Addict is an app for both iOS and Android that records video and data from your drive. Its commonly used for track purposes but can also be used for those spirited mountain road drives. It records video either by your phone or via WIFI with GoPro, it can connect to your cars data via ODB2, and uses your phones GPS to map the ride. The end result is a video that has real time features like maps, RPM, MPH, throttle and so much more overlaid on the video.
Normal video shot from a moving vehicle can sometimes be disappointing slow compared to how you perceived it when driving. With these data points overlaid onto the video you now have a great perspective of whats going on.
Where they make their money on Race Render which is the software that takes your video, data and combines them together letting you customize the layout. The free version of Race Render works great and gives you a fantastic idea of what its capable of and would work just fine for most use cases. Biggest gripe for normal usage is their logo that you can not remove, but can move around.
Here is one of HP Tuners the maker of Track Addicts example videos of what this all can do: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M4MOPdjL8L8
My setup is as follows:
- Track Addict app + Race Render software
- Cheap pre-paid android phone
- OBDLink LX Bluetooth ODB2 adapter
- GoPro Hero5 + mounting equipment
Here is a link to their site listing ODB2 devices that are compatible and known to work. As you will see the ODB2 adapters for iOS are expensive. The free iOS app also is more limited than the android and has a paid pro version to get most of the features. The android app has just about everything for free. So instead of paying for the app on iOS and also spending more on a ODB2 adapter just buy a cheap pre-paid Android phone dedicated just for this purpose and a cheap ODB2 adapter. One more thing to remember is you can only connect to one Wifi device and one Bluetooth device at any point of time. Gopro uses Wifi so I had to use ODB2 over Bluetooth. Some of the iOS compatible devices are only compatible with Track Addict over Wifi, so research carefully. You could just use your phones camera to record video and use Wifi ODB2 for iOS.
Setting up is as simple as connecting the ODB2 and Gopro up to your phone respectively, verifying the Track Addict app see’s both then hitting the record button. Once done stop recording and take the files off both devices and use the Race Render software to combine them. You will probably spend more time playing with the settings in Race Render than recording as there is lots to customize. Upload to YouTube and you are set!