In time for the 2026 season, the eChook live telemetry website has had a complete overhaul – lots of new features for teams, and even some for spectators.
TLDR? – Have a peek at the demo mode here instead: eChook Live
New Features:
New Graphs – each metric now has its own graph, but all graphs are synchronised, so pan and zoom together, and have synchronised cursors for comparing values. Laps are clearly indicated on the graphs by alternating Black and Grey backgrounds. Graphs to show can be selected on the left, and the order they are shown in is determined by the order they are selected in.
Data History – Whenever the server receives data from your car it is stored in a database. From the website you can recover this data through the history menu at the top of the page – either to fill in the last half hours data, or to fetch data from a past race. Once data is over 10 days old, it is averaged to one data point every 10 seconds to reduce the database size.
Map View – The map view is back and more useful – now showing a history trail in a colour gradient tracing throttle, current, speed etc.
Lap Tables – This tab lists your completed laps and their key stats, comparing each stat to last lap with a percentage indicator and simple bar graph. Next to each race heading there is a button do download that races data as a .csv file, or to zoom the graphs in the first tab to show that race. To the far right of the lap table there is a button to zoom graphs to that lap too.
Spectator View
Spectator view is available when three or more cars are using the eChook telemetry system on a recognised track, and is available to anyone from the main eChook live login screen. It displays a list of cars, their location on track, and their speed. This is very similar to the information already available to any spectator, or from the timings site, but may add an interesting view to the race. If a team does not want to contribute to this, there is an opt-out in the settings tab.
A Technical Bit
This update has been a long time coming, and has necessitated a full re-write of both the server and the front end. I have now also separated the two – the frontend is a static single page application served directly from github, reducing the demand on my (little!) server when there is a race going on. The frontend should always load quickly and reliably now! For those interested it was developed using the Vue framework and Tailwind CSS, and is open sourced on github.
The server now purely runs the backend, which is implemented in node.js. Previously it was a standalone app, kept alive by the PM2 process manager on an Ubuntu Server vps. It has now evolved a bit, deployed as a docker container, alongside a postgres database for storing all the telemetry data and a Grafana instance to give me some better insights into server metrics.
The communication interfaces have been upgraded, with all the data to the website now being transferred over websocket and packed with MessagePack instead of JSON to significantly reduce the bandwidth required, and the general security has been significantly increased – not that I ever caught anyone trying to spoof car data, but there had been plenty of SQL injection attempts! (All unsuccessful, I hasten to add)
I have also given myself a far more useful admin interface, that will allow me to help any teams having issues far more effectively – and without me having to go trawling through server logs! Satisfyingly, this has already proved really useful.
Do I smell AI?
Well, yes you do. I need to give credit where credit is due, and this refresh would have taken 10x longer – and possibly wouldn’t ever have been finished to a level I was happy to release – without AI assistance. I have used this as my first real experiment into coding with AI, and Claude and Antigravity have enabled everything to to be built so much more quickly than if I was ‘hand coding’ and testing myself, and I’ve learnt a lot from them in the process! I can count on one hand the times I’ve had to go and fix a bit of code that they haven’t been able to. Mighty impressive, and just a bit terrifying!
Testing and Feedback
The first race weekend is going to be the first real test on the server, I’ll be keeping an eye on it, but if teams experience any issues I’d – as ever – be really grateful to hear about them! Let me know how you get on with the new website!
If you want to give it a try, there’s a demo mode available via the link at the bottom of the login box: https://live.eChook.uk