RaceBox Micro Review – The Ultimate GPS Track Tool

This tiny little thing is possibly the most powerful GPS unit on the market, and yet it’s surprisingly affordable, ridiculously tiny and light, oh and it’s kinda hackable too. This is the RaceBox Micro, a 25 hertz GPS receiver, that’s meant for tracking stuff that goes fast. On their website they show it strapped to FPV drones, although the name comes from automotive racing, where the idea is you can track your lap times around a track – either during a race or just for fun – to help you improve your times. Basically, you strap this to anything that moves so you can know where it went, and how fast. It’s really cool, so let’s take a closer look!

In the tiny clear plastic shell – which RaceBox provide a STEP file for should you want to incorporate it into your own projects or designs – you’ll find the PCB, complete with a SAM-M10Q GNSS module, which can use GPS, GLONASS, Galileo, Beidou, SBAS and QZSS satellites, and the special part is that it’ll get that data 25 times per second. This, the original RaceBox I’ve had for a couple years now, only does 10 hertz, and your phone? Well that’s 1 hertz. With that speed comes more accuracy too – you know when you’re using your phone to navigate while driving, and maps thinks you’re driving in a field somewhere, or on a road parallel to the one you’re actually on? Well that’s because your phone can only really be accurate within 5 metres or so – that’s 16 feet for the yanks – whereas this RaceBox Micro can be accurate down to just 10 centimetres, or 4 inches. Yeah, big difference huh. That polling rate increase also means when travelling fast – like 150 miles per hour down a straight at Donington Park – this thing can still keep up, and give you a load of data points to read from.

The GPS isn’t all though, this also comes with an incredibly sensitive gyro and accelerometer, that provide up to 8G of force capture. That means not only can you tie your IRL speed to a position on track, but you can record how much braking force you had, how much cornering force, and map things like when you must have started accelerating out the corner. This is a lot of data that the right kind of nerd will absolutely love. The board has a 128Mbit flash chip onboard, meaning 16MB of usable space, of which RaceBox claims you can store 130 minutes of data at 25Hz, or 325 minutes of data (that’s around 5 and a half hours) at 10Hz. 

This is all powered primarily through these leads, which accept anywhere from 3.6V to 16V, meaning you can wire this straight into your car or bike with no problems, or power it off of USB. I happened to have a MicroUSB breakout header spare so I made this little adapter wire, but the fact that this supports such a large input voltage range is really cool. You can also use the included CR1220 coin cell battery to keep the device powered on enough to keep GPS lock to speed up the boot up time. On the digital side of things, you connect to this via Bluetooth 5.2, either through RaceBox’s own app that we’ll be taking a look at shortly, or via a third party app of your choice. RaceBox opted to keep things standardised here, using the NMEA Standard Protocol for the GPS data, meaning this should be pretty interoperable with other apps and tools. I do love a good open standard… 

As for how to actually use the thing – once it’s powered on and the GPS light comes on, you can use the built in button to start recording data. This is fully standalone – although to get data off of it you will need to connect to it somehow. RaceBox also gives you access to the full documentation of the Bluetooth stack, everything from the board itself to the GNSS data is listed, so if you do want to go whole-hog and build this into your own project, they give you everything you should need to do that. Again, this level of transparency and openness is really great to see. 

For me though, I wedged it into my passenger seat, powered it up, then gave it the minute or two it needed to get a GPS fix. I connected via bluetooth and controlled it from there, as that’s how you can get it to record either lap times or drag sessions. I also brought along my original RaceBox for a bit of comparison – although interestingly that one got a GPS fix considerably quicker than this little guy. Either way once it’s up and running, you can head off. In my case I had a bit of travel time between base and the, let’s say private road used for testing. In the drag session you can set it up to time specific events – 0-30, 0-60, 0-100 kilometres, braking, quarter mile, and really anything else you want. Technically speaking it’ll only record those metrics, although it does save all the raw data, so you can always import said data later and figure out any other measurements you’d want to take. 

Taking a look at the data for the 0-60, you can see it records basically everything you could want. Speed, obviously, but also g-forces, and the altitude. This is actually the first discrepancy between the two boxes – the micro reckons I started at 33m and ended at 35m, whereas the original reckons it was 33/33 start and finish. That means the corrected time – that is the time accounting for the slope – is different. Now I forgot to turn off 1FT rollout on the micro so it’s going to be slightly slower there too, but the micro reckons it took my Audi S4 4.95 seconds to get to 60 miles per hour – or at least that’s what it would take on a flat bit of road. It actually took 5.11 seconds, where the original reckons 5.34 or 5.45 seconds uncorrected, although that is with the first foot included – if you subtract the first 5KPH you’ll take 0.35 seconds off the time and hey-presto you’ve got basically identical timings.

As for the track mode, sadly I can’t just pop round to my local track and have a quick rip around to tell you how well it’d track me, but at least with a brief test on the road, you get a map overlay of your route, which you can then scroll through to see your speed, acceleration G, cornering G and combined G. Annoyingly the original RaceBox had a bit of a freak out and seems to have not saved the data for this one to be able to compare the two, but it’s clear the micro is plenty accurate for this. 

You can also download the raw GPS, gyro and accelerometer data from the Racebox website – which also lets you verify that yes, this is 25 hertz worth of data. That’s a lot, I mean it’s 2.5x what the original Racebox can do, and 25x what your phone can do, so it’s pretty handy. Realistically though, these two RaceBox products are fundamentally different – or at least they are for significantly different use cases. The original, with its built in screen and windscreen-mounted design is clearly meant to be used in-car. Whether that’s during a track day to see in-lap improvements you can make, or just as an incredibly accurate speedo when you’re out for a spirited drive, it’s feasibly a hobbyist or enthusiast product. The micro on the other hand is clearly something you’re meant to built into your race car, bike, or RC quad/car, hit record at the start and end, then go back and download all the data and see how you did. There’s no live feedback, it’s all done after the fact. If that suits your use case though, this is a really cool bit of kit, and it’s only around £110 as of filming. Considering that Draggy, one of the only other high hertz GPS receivers in the same sort of price bracket, is £145 right now, and that’s only 10 hertz, this looks like one hell of a deal. I’m happy with my original RaceBox, but if you have a use case, I do really like this thing, and RaceBox in general. Their openness, both with the raw data and the specs is really nice to see.