I'm looking into buying a GoPro to use for autocross and track days. I understand that in the past, we've had to buy a separate GPS system like a VBOX for telemetry. The newer model GoPro's have GPS capability and I haven't been able to find any info on their capability to interface with apps like solostorm, etc. for telemetry. I've tried to find the info on refresh rates and all that I've seen (not official) is that the GPS refresh rate is 18 hz for a Hero 6 Black. I believe that is higher than the VBOX that I saw at 10 hz.

Can anyone confirm or deny the ability to use a GoPro's GPS for telemetry? I'm trying to choose a camera and I'm willing to buy a more expensive version if it affords me telemetry.

 

The slower GPS cameras, cell phone (harry's, etc) use an average speed vs predictive position so for basic lap timing most anything will be good enough.
My Garmin Virb Elite was $110 refirb and it's good enough for me.

 

I can't help you with the GoPro in particular, but I looked at this in 2017 and chose the Garmin VIRB Ultra 30 over the GoPro for two main reasons:
- I found the VIRB Edit software easier to use for my needs
- the Garmin was able to capture OBDII data via a bluetooth dongle. All of the data (including GPS) can be overlaid via the editing software.

It's been two years since so I'd expect them all to have moved forward with improved solutions.

 

I just bought a gopro hero 7 and I noticed that it had some basic telemetry, but I don't think you can extract it separately from the video (although I haven't tried) to get it into a data analysis app. But if you're in the market for a decent camera and haven't taken a step into data before it's a great first step. Will let you quickly and visually compare runs and see how your speeds are doing in different spots on the course. I'm not sure I trust the g-force data in it, and generally the best mounting spot for capturing video is not the best spot for capturing accelerometer data.

Here's my first video with the GoPro data overlay. It was so easy to produce this video.

 

Wait, what? How did you enable that?

 

Video quality is great! I think at this point, I am trying to decide between a hero 6 black and hero 7 black. The price difference is about $100 which is not insignificant. Is all of your data (MPH, accelerometer, and map) strictly from the GoPro? Any idea if there is an easy way to overlay something else like throttle and brake pedal positioning from a FlashPro?

 

It's in the app on the phone. They have a handful of different overlays you can add to the video. You can just choose which ones you want to add and where you want them to be. It's not terribly sophisticated but it's fantastic for getting a quick video created. I could see it being very useful to review between runs at an autox

 

Yes, all data in the video above is strictly from the gopro. No there's no way to add additional data channels that I know of. You'd need to do that using an outside app and data logger.


The other 2 big things for me with this are - You can tether the camera to your phone and livestream off the camera, we want to do in-car livestreams while we are on OLOA this year.
- Image stabilization is magical - Check out the video below taken from my gopro 5 that didn't have stabilization, everything is the same except the camera.

 

I like the stabilization, I just wish there was a way to fix the weird panning it does in corners. It can get kind of weird in tracks that have a lot of longer corners


Interesting, that is what I get for not really exploring the app. I appreciate it

 

This was why I chose the Garmin.