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Getting Started with Slicks Telemetry

Welcome to the Slicks Telemetry package. This guide will help you install the package and write your first script to analyze race data.

1. Installation

For Users

To install the latest stable version directly from GitHub:

pip install slicks

For Developers (Contributing)

If you want to modify the package source code:

git clone https://github.com/Western-Formula-Racing/wfr-telemetry.git
cd wfr-telemetry
pip install -e .

2. Quick Start

Here is the minimal code needed to connect to the database and download data for a specific sensor.

Step 1: Import and Configure

The package connects to the InfluxDB database automatically using defaults, but you can configure it explicitly.

import slicks
from datetime import datetime

# Optional: Configure manually (or use .env file / defaults)
slicks.connect_influxdb3(
    url="http://your-influx-server:8086",
    token="your-token-here", # Ask Data Lead for your token
    org="Docs",
    db="WFR25"
)

Step 2: Define Time Range

Always use Python's datetime objects.

start = datetime(2025, 9, 28, 12, 0, 0) # Sept 28, 2025 at 12:00 PM
end   = datetime(2025, 9, 28, 14, 0, 0) # Sept 28, 2025 at 02:00 PM

Step 3: Fetch Data

You can request a single sensor or a list of sensors.

# Fetch Motor Speed
df = slicks.fetch_telemetry(start, end, "INV_Motor_Speed")

if df is not None:
    print(df.head())
    print(f"Average Speed: {df['INV_Motor_Speed'].mean():.2f}")
else:
    print("No data found for this range.")

3. Key Concepts

Movement Filtering (Default: On)

By default, fetch_telemetry filters out data when the car is stationary (idling in the pits). This ensures your averages (like average speed or temp) represent driving conditions.

To see raw data (including pit/idle time), pass filter_movement=False:

df_raw = slicks.fetch_telemetry(start, end, "INV_Motor_Speed", filter_movement=False)

Auto-Resampling

By default, data is aligned to a 1-second frequency (1s). This makes it easy to plot multiple sensors on the same graph without worrying about mismatched timestamps.

To get raw data without resampling, pass resample=None:

df_raw = slicks.fetch_telemetry(start, end, "INV_Motor_Speed", resample=None)

You can also specify a custom frequency using any pandas frequency string:

# High-resolution data (100ms)
df_fast = slicks.fetch_telemetry(start, end, "INV_Motor_Speed", resample="100ms")

# Lower resolution (5 seconds)
df_slow = slicks.fetch_telemetry(start, end, "INV_Motor_Speed", resample="5s")