Show HN: Building a Formula1 (Game) Telemetry Display Using Crystal and RethinkDB

devan.blaze.com.au

17 points·cyberferret··6 comments

Very cool. Is there any need to wait until after pushing to rethinkdb before updating the websockets? I'd look for I/O concurrency here and block until they're all complete.

Possibly, that might make it faster and eliminate further blocking.

The entire convert/save/push to websockets activity though, is done on a separate _fibre_ in Crystal - essentially a spawned background thread. So even if one packet went awry, it shouldn't really block subsequent packets from coming through. I suppose I could go further, and within the spawned fibre, I could spawn another fibre for the write ops so it didn't get in the way of the web socket push op.

But then again, when I checked the Crystal CPU and memory footprint, it was really low, and even at the highest UDP telemetry rate of 60Hz, I don't think I lost any packets due to Crystal's sheer speed of handling them.

Any reason on why not open-sourcing this? Seems like a fun project to work on. Not much in worth tho.

I may do that, once I clean up the code a little I might throw it up on Github so that others can tweak and improve it.

Really surprised codemasters included a telemetry feed from the game, that's so cool.

Imagine if more games did that?

I believe most of the Codemasters racing games do have this feature. Documentation is a little scarce though, and we have to rely on their forum for information.

I was actually surprised by the number of third party racing wheels and displays that took advantage of this telemetry though. There are a lot of them that are now virtually indistinguishable from the real hardware in how they operate.

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