The Software created with Delphi controls more than 250 Cars, 40 Airplanes and 930 Trains in the Miniature Wunderland in Hamburg, Germany:

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The Software created with Delphi controls more than 250 Cars, 40 Airplanes and 930 Trains in the Miniature Wunderland in Hamburg, Germany:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ACkmg3Y64_s

If you travel to Hamburg, take some time to visit The Miniature Wunderland. It is amazing!

Here is a photo from the control station; notice the logo at the top :-)

Comments

  1. David MillingtonDecember 17, 2014 at 6:23 AM

    That is very impressive. I'd love to hear more about the software, if that's possible?

    The video said controlling it all takes "40 computers" if I heard it right...

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  2. Nándor KissDecember 17, 2014 at 6:33 AM

    Yeah, 40 computers :)
    [ Turned subtitles on :) ]

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  3. Achim KalwaDecember 17, 2014 at 6:34 AM

    There is some information about the software starting here:

    http://www.miniatur-wunderland.com/exhibit/technology/carsystem/technology/

    On my visit yesterday they said there are 46 computers for controlling.

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  4. Nick HodgesDecember 17, 2014 at 7:01 AM

    Nice!

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  5. David MillingtonDecember 17, 2014 at 7:12 AM

    Thanks for the link Achim Kalwa. It's an interesting read. Are you one of the developers of the software?

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  6. Achim KalwaDecember 17, 2014 at 7:16 AM

    David Millington No, I'm not affiliated in any way to this project.

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  7. David MillingtonDecember 17, 2014 at 7:21 AM

    This bit is fascinating (on one of the other pages): "Manouvering [of ships] requires a precision of 1 mm... First, we tried an infra-red  camera surveillance... The different height of the ships and water levels, the distortion of the lenses, refraction of the light, and more factors required a voluminous software. Although six(!) fast PCs were allocated, this process proved to be too complex and was trashed after 15.000 lines of source code were written.

    [Somebody] suggested to use ultrasonic devices. 48 piezo loudspeakers would have had to be installed, each fitted out with it’s own processor and the detection would have worked using the cross bearing method. All problems that popped up during testing were solved by August, 2004, for instance: longer ways due to diffraction at reflections. During a test run in a 252-room a precision of 1 mm was achieved -  a fantastic result."

    I used to work on sonar processing software, ie analysis of acoustic signals to derive various bits of information - I'm imagining the code they would have had to write to achieve this. Very nice, and very interesting to know this is how their ship manoeuvring works.

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  8. Adrian knowlesDecember 17, 2014 at 1:03 PM

    Thanks for sharing Achim!
    I'm not as technical as you guys so will take the same approach as Walt Whitman in "When I Heard the Learn’d Astronomer" .... looks a fun place to visit, will not worry about the technical details :-)

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  9. Alexander BenikowskiDecember 17, 2014 at 5:02 PM

    they are doing it with delphi? DIdn't know about it. Been there YEARS ago. Absolutely amazing. Need to revisit for all the new stuff!

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  10. Klaus EdelmannDecember 18, 2014 at 1:44 AM

    Yes, it's (still) Delphi 7, IIRC.

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  11. Dany MarmurDecember 18, 2014 at 4:34 AM

    Cool! Thanks for the share.

    ReplyDelete

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