ADVANCE DDU · THE PILOT'S MANUAL
This page has two parts. Part 1 is the two-minute overview — read it before your first session. Part 2 is the full, detailed reference — every button, all 100 functions, every menu — written for a pilot, not a developer. Come back to it whenever you want to get more out of the app. This is v2.0: a welcome screen, dark menus, grey cells, a taskbar icon per window (pin each one in VR) and insertable mode panels.
PART 1 · OVERVIEW
ADVANCE DDU is a blank canvas for your wheel rim or a second screen: you decide how many cells there are, what each one shows, and what colour it is. Nothing is fixed — you build it once, save it, and it's remembered exactly as you left it, car after car, track after track.
It shares the same reference-lap engine as the rest of the family — RACE's braking alert included — so nothing about braking points, corner colours or deltas is preloaded. It all comes from a reference lap you supply.
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Split, merge and recolour cells by dragging — no config files, no menus to hunt through.
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The same 3 · 2 · 1 · BRAKE countdown as RACE DDU, against your own reference lap — any car, any track.
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Colin McRae style: the road bends by how tight the corner is, and it calls the gear to take — like a co-driver.
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Green breathes with the throttle, red on the brake, blue on lift, orange if you go off — stream-ready, or swap in your own image.
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7 built-in starting layouts (Practice, Qualy, Race, Endurance, Coach, Data…), plus save up to 20 of your own.
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Organised and searchable, so you find the one you want without hunting. Each with its own ⚙ settings.
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Each one independent — its own layout, colours and mode — spread the information across your rig.
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No Windows border, always on top, ready for OpenKneeboard or a second simulator screen.
Open ▦ MODE and choose a starting layout — RACE, ENDURANCE, DATA, or start FREE from a blank canvas.
Load a Garage 61 CSV, or drive one clean lap and hit record — either works.
Flip out of EDIT mode so nothing can be bumped by accident, and join your session.
That's the whole idea. Everything below is the same app explained in full — read on whenever you want the fine detail on any part of it.
Twenty sections, in the order you'll actually use them: getting started, the two modes, building your canvas, the full 100-function catalogue, presets, the frame, multi-window, the reference lap and recording, the animated logo, RALLY, NOTES, comparing rivals, languages, running without iRacing, licensing, and the FAQ.
01 · GETTING STARTED
The app starts by looking for iRacing automatically. If iRacing is open and you're on track, data starts flowing instantly; if not, the frame shows NO IRACING and waits — nothing breaks, there just aren't any numbers to show yet.
The first time you open it, you'll see a ready-made sample layout (speed, gear, RPM, Brake Alert, a delta graph, a pedal graph, fuel and flags) with this same manual opened inside the app for reference. From then on, everything you change is saved automatically — close the app mid-session and reopen it later, and it's exactly as you left it.
To try it without iRacing: launch the app in simulation mode (--sim from
the command line, or the demo shortcut if one is included). Every function comes alive with
synthetic data — ideal for building your layout and testing Brake Alert before you're
actually on track.
02 · EDIT & ON TRACK
The big button in the top-left corner of the frame toggles between the app's only two modes:
The rest of the frame's controls (language, pin, VR, fullscreen…) normally hide themselves in ON TRACK to stay out of the way, and reappear the moment you move the mouse to the top edge of the window — so they're always one hover away, without cluttering the view while you drive.
03 · THE CANVAS & CELLS
Switch to EDIT and every cell shows 4 small buttons in its top-right corner:
Hover the blue line separating two cells: the cursor changes shape. Click and drag to move that divider — there's no dialog to confirm, the moment you release the mouse it's saved. Every division respects a minimum size per side, so you can't shrink a cell down to nothing by accident.
04 · CHOOSING A FUNCTION
The picker has tabs for the 9 categories on the left and a search box on top — type "fuel", "rain", "licence"… and it filters by name and description across all categories at once. The function you already have is highlighted.
Choosing "∅ Empty" (at the very top) leaves the cell with no function — handy to reserve space, or just to clear a cell while you reorganise. Picking a new function keeps whether the function's name label is shown or not, but every other setting starts fresh at that function's defaults.
05 · THE 100-FUNCTION CATALOGUE
The name in parentheses is what you'll see on the cell itself — always in technical English, racing's universal language.
On the fine offsets: several functions (speed, RPM, fuel, volts…) have an offset setting: adds or subtracts a small fixed amount from the value shown. It's there to correct differences between what your wheel/pedals report and what the game reports, without having to recalibrate anything.
06 · COLOURS & SETTINGS (⚙)
The ⚙ button on a cell opens a window with:
Everything applies instantly and saves itself the moment you close the window with Accept.
07 · MODE: TEMPLATES AND YOUR OWN PRESETS
The ▦ MODE button on the frame opens a "Start with…" menu with 7 ready-made templates:
Pick one and the app builds it instantly, in EDIT mode, ready for you to adjust to taste (split cells, change colours, swap a function…).
Build the panel exactly how you want it and, in the same ▦ MODE → 💾 Save current preset… menu, give it a name. From then on it appears alongside the 7 built-in ones, inside "Your presets", ready whenever you want it back. Saving under a name that already exists overwrites it (doesn't duplicate it). To remove one, 🗑 Delete preset lists your presets and deletes them with one click. You can save up to 20 of your own.
08 · THE FRAME: EVERY BUTTON
Left to right:
Frame colour: right-click the housing (not the screen) to pick the frame's colour: several ready-made tones, an "Other colour…" with the full picker, or back to the factory colour. The texture and screws stay put — only the background tone changes.
09 · SEVERAL SCREENS AT ONCE
The ➕🖥 button opens a new DDU window, fully independent from the others: its own cell layout, its own colours, its own EDIT/ON TRACK mode — but all of them read the same car telemetry, so they always stay in sync. It's how you spread information across several monitors of your rig (one with car data, another with Relative or Standings, another with Brake Alert…).
Each window closes with its own ✕ button; closing the last one closes the app. There's no practical minimum size — you can leave one tiny window with a single cell (say, just speed) in a corner of the screen.
New: every window can also sprout up to 4 docked screens of its own — top, bottom, left, right — from the ▥ SCREENS button on the frame. They're glued to that window and move with it, split into cells and hold functions exactly like the main screen (same 100-function catalogue, same picker — not a smaller one), and their thickness is set by dragging the outer edge with the mouse.
10 · THE WINDOW
11 · THE REFERENCE LAP
The REF button on the frame opens a menu with these options:
A green dot on the REF button shows a reference is currently loaded. The functions that need a reference lap to work are: Brake Alert, Brake Alert 2, RALLY, REF LAP, and Driver Inputs when you choose to show the CSV or both traces.
12 · RECORDING A FULL SESSION
Pressing "Record session (REC)" starts recording your telemetry, automatically splitting it every time you cross the finish line. The lap you start with (if you begin mid-lap) is discarded — only complete laps are saved.
Every complete lap is saved as its own CSV file, inside a folder named after the track and the date:
RaceCanvas_grabaciones/<track>_<date_time>/Lap 03 - 1.29.729.csv
Pressing "Stop session" leaves you with that folder full of laps. From the REF menu, "Recorded laps" lets you pick any of them as your new reference (⚡ marks the session's fastest) — and being plain CSV files, you can also open them in Excel or your own analysis tool.
13 · THE PUSH & LIFT LOGO
The LOGO function comes, by default, with the animated PUSH & LIFT logo — designed to read at a glance on a stream or a second screen, and to look good doing it:
If you'd rather use your own image (your team's logo, a sponsor, your stream's brand), open the cell's ⚙ and use "Choose image…" to load a PNG or GIF; "Remove image" goes back to the animated factory logo.
This animated-logo behaviour is fixed — it doesn't change between versions and can't be turned off except by swapping in your own image. It's the house's visual signature.
14 · RALLY
The RALLY function shows a big left or right arrow depending on which way the next corner turns, and the road itself bends by how tight the corner is (a hairpin nearly turns back on itself; a fast kink barely leans). The big number is the lowest gear to take in that corner, read from your reference lap, with the word TIGHT / MEDIUM / FAST and a countdown in seconds. The arrow's colour can be set to reflect either the braking force needed (like Brake Alert) or the speed through the corner — either way, red means "careful, this one needs work" and blue means "barely touch anything."
Like Brake Alert, it needs a reference lap loaded to know where the corners are.
15 · NOTES
Write whatever you want in the cell's ⚙: setup reminders ("cold pressure 1.9 front"), notes to yourself mid-race, or a message for the stream chat. It can align centre or left, and the font size adjusts itself to fit the text.
16 · FONTS & OFF-TRACK FLASH
Right-click on the frame to choose, for that screen, one of 4 data fonts (instrument, digital, bold and a condensed one — all already on Windows, nothing to download), and to turn the off-track flash on or off.
With the flash on, the moment you run wide (all four wheels off) the edge of the screen pulses red/amber — instant, without taking your eyes off the data. Gold on tricky, run-off-heavy tracks. Each screen keeps its own font and flash choice.
17 · STANDINGS & THE 5 RELATIVES
18 · LANGUAGES
English, Español, Deutsch, Français, Italiano and 中文. Switch anytime with the frame's 🌐 button — it affects the whole interface instantly, no restart needed.
19 · WITHOUT IRACING
If iRacing isn't running, the frame shows NO IRACING in grey and cells wait with dashes — nothing breaks. The moment you open iRacing and join a session, data starts flowing on its own. The SIM indicator in amber appears when you're using synthetic demo data (to try the panel without needing the simulator open at all).
20 · LICENSING & FAQ
ADVANCE DDU is free in full during the open beta — every function, no card needed.
No. You can build the whole panel, choose functions and colours, and save presets without iRacing open. You only need iRacing on track to see live numbers.
Yes — the CSV loader auto-detects that format (and other generic ones with throttle/brake columns).
No. Everything saves automatically — layout, colours, functions, your own presets, reference lap — and comes back exactly as it was next time you open the app.
Yes. The frame's VR button removes the Windows border and keeps the window always on top, built for OpenKneeboard or for capturing it inside the headset.
Up to 4, each independent (its own layout, colours, mode), all sharing the same telemetry.