James Gosling: on the Java Road

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20060430 Sunday April 30, 2006


More slot car hacking

The madness of putting together all of the material and demos for JavaOne is slowly calming down as things come together. The slot car race programming challenge has been sucking up a lot of my time (particularly the software infrastructure). This isn't a challenge that MATLAB is well suited for: it would be if there were accelerometers on the car, but there aren't. It can be used, and I have seen some cool tools to transform MATLAB into RTSJ code. It's also not entirely possible to just precompute a voltage profile and blindly follow it: The physical world is unpredicable in all kind of small ways: tires slip; engines heat up and become less efficient; the track gets polished; there are slight differences between the cars... A winning entry will have to have some degree of adaptive behaviour. Permalink Comments [5]

Comments:

In Mind Design II (John Haugeland, MIT Press, 1997), Timothy van Gelder reviews the differences between digital and dynamic control, particularly when it comes to actual, physical-world dynamics of the type you describe here.

Posted by M. Mortazavi on May 01, 2006 at 03:58 PM PDT #

Cool point! This review of the differences between digital and dynamic control is interesting

Posted by Grace Smith on May 02, 2006 at 04:39 AM PDT #

On Challenge 24 there was a similar task (check the gallery). We had to control slot cars through a server, only by seting the speed. Unfortunately the only feedback was 3 webcam with 1-2s latency so adaptivity was nearly impossible. Anyway slot car programing is great fun.

Posted by Gábor Hargitai on May 02, 2006 at 03:56 PM PDT #

Hmm, a wicked thought: since there is a seperate sensor to detect start/finish (presumably the only data used to measure the performance of the car) a cheesy solution would be to drive forward briefly and then reverse the voltage and back over the sensor again (possibly getting a sub-second "lap" time).

Posted by Mike T. Miller on May 02, 2006 at 04:00 PM PDT #

We have a slot car retail website and we've been getting questions about setting up computers with the tracksets. But we don't have the time to become experts at this.. Need a place to send our customers for info.. Would this blog work or do you have other suggestionsj? Appreciate the help :)

Posted by Jim Corley on May 07, 2006 at 11:21 AM PDT #

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