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.
