February 13, 2010
As the 2010 Winter Olympics start, it is nice to know that the application controlling the thousands of LEDs of the Vancouver Olympic Rings was written in Delphi.
posted by
marcocantu @ 1:22AM | 11 Comments
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11 Comments
Vancouver Olympic Rings... Powered by Delphi
Were you talking to John Dammeyer?
http://groups.google.com/group/newac-users/browse_thread/thread/d78622ae2d7459e3#
Comment by Bruce McGee on February 13, 12:02
Vancouver Olympic Rings... Powered by Delphi
Bruce,
very nice link... with specific reference to Delphi.
No, my source is Doug Filteau, who worked on the
software.
Comment by Marco Cantu
[http://www.marcocantu.com]
on February 13, 15:00
Vancouver Olympic Rings... Powered by Delphi
Wauw, looks good. Now listed on Delphi Wiki App List
in the category "Other Prestigious Delphi Applications".
One question, on the different videos we see ring logo
being mounted on a hill but also seen in the harbor.
Is it the same animated sign that has been moved? Or
are there multiple implementations of this animated sign?
Comment by Rif on February 13, 17:33
Vancouver Olympic Rings... Powered by Delphi
An other intressting project which is realised with
Delphi is complete controling of the famous
Miniatur-Wunderland
http://www.miniatur-wunderland.de
in Hamburg
Here is an Video of what is controled with Delphi
(sorry but is only in german):
http://www.miniatur-wunderland.de/anlage/video/miwula-tv/film/artikel/gerrits-tagebuch-vol-13-hinter-den-technischen-kulissen/
Comment by Heinz Z.
[]
on February 15, 05:37
Vancouver Olympic Rings... Powered by Delphi
I'm one of the software guys (there are currently two
of us, John and myself). There are two ring units: a
single-sided unit near Vancouver International Airport
(YVR) and the double sided unit mounted on a rail barge
in Vancouver's Coal Harbour on the downtown waterfront.
John and I will be providing technical data in the very
near future about the various technologies involved.
Comment by Doug Filteau on February 15, 09:27
Vancouver Olympic Rings... Powered by Delphi
Yes Delphi at the Olympics.
Delphi 2007 rocks!!!!
http://groups.google.com/group/newac-
users/browse_thread/thread/d78622ae2d7459e3#
Comment by batman on February 17, 18:25
Vancouver Olympic Rings... Powered by Delphi
I see both Olympic ring set ups on a daily basis and keep hoping for the
change .Without the multi coloured rings it just does not give you the
feeling that it is the Olympics.With the people that I have shared this
with they have said the same thing.It looks simply like tarnished
tradition by the host city. I'm disappointed. regards Tino.
Comment by Tino & Sabrina Piovesan on February 18, 17:42
Vancouver Olympic Rings... Powered by Delphi
I was wondering when I watched it why the animation
was so slow and jerky. Now I know!
Comment by Crno Srce on February 23, 13:39
Vancouver Olympic Rings... Powered by Delphi
It's only jerky cause it's on Youtube. And it's slow
deliberately... to make it look cool. Delphi's the
best and anyone who says otherwise doesn't know what
they're talking about.
Comment by Sorm Saerdna on February 24, 02:16
Vancouver Olympic Rings... Powered by Delphi
Not only this, also the commentary units used by the
commentators of the different TVs is controlled and
programmed by Delphi :)
Comment by Moore on February 25, 15:20
Vancouver Olympic Rings... Powered by Delphi
Hi,
A bit of detail about the Winter Olympic Rings. I
designed the Lights, the control system and the
underlying driver software that ran the Olympic Rings.
The rings were made up of 150 lamp modules per ring.
Each lamp module had a CAN bus inteface and to avoid
the limitation of no more than 120 units on a CAN
bus, I used TKE WCS-10 bridges to rebroad cast the
CAN messages from a 9S12 controller board.
The 9S12 controller had 5 CAN bus ports, one for each
ring. I wrote the software for it in C and
interfaced to the PC with an FTDI F245 USB to
parallel controller. ASCII commands and data from
the PC modified a data structure inside the 9S12. A
timer based function sent the data structure out to
the rings every 20mS.
On the PC side I started with a simple Delphi 5
application that slowly became a complete and
dedicated control program for working with the lamp
modules. I passed that control program to Ian
Mackay, a long term friend and associate (30 years)
to use as the interface for his graphical rings
control program.
Ian then wrote (using Delphi 6) a program that used
XML data structure and files to create full featured
light shows. It was nothing short of incredible
considering it was written in less than 2 months.
We now had two Delpi applications. Ian's
RingEdit.exe for running shows, scheduling and
monitoring each light. Each light had a temperatuer
sensor and Ian created a graphical display that
showed the temperature of the light as a colour. We
could watch the lights heat up from the sun during
the day.
The second app was my RingLightTester.exe that let me
change NodeIDs, query lamp status, monitor features
and play simple shows.
That was all for the Olympic rings at YVR airport.
Later that summer (2009) we were awarded the contract
to build a double set of rings (back to back) that
would eventually float on a barge at Coal Harbour in
Vancouver. Alas Ian never saw that as he succumed to
complications from Cancer.
Running two USB ports with control of power relays on
a barge with no easy access meant the software had to
be even more robust and run shows that were now
produced by an outside agency who had no
understanding of the speed limitations of the USB to
9S12 interface.
After a short search I found Doug Filteau local in
Victoria BC. We managed to get all the source code
including some of Ian's custom libraries (no one
expects to die in the middle of project) and I ported
the code to Delphi 2007.
I then handed that off to Doug to clean up so that
the compiler would generate 0 error warnings. Doug
and I traded ownership of the program back and forth
over the next few weeks as I added dual ring support
and Doug added or modified much of the other support
code to make it work with the dual USB ports.
I think though, Dougs crowning achievement really was
the addition of the email support to the
application. I asked for and got the ability to play
shows, control power etc. all by sending emails from
my iPhone or my managers Blackberry.
Now when a Canadian Athelete won a medal, we'd send
an email to a gmail account monitored every 30
seconds by the barge rings and the airport rings and
the respective show for Gold, Silver Bronze would
play.
With Doug's help, taking on a somewhat undocumented
project and his support in the two and half months,
we to built 1500 new lights, two brand new 9S12
controllers and a port from Delphi 6 with huge
internet libraries to a clean Delphi 2007 port.
The Orings were without doubt a great success.
Without the support of the Delphi community it may
not have worked as well as it did.
John Dammeyer
Comment by John Dammeyer
[http://www.autoartisans.com]
on September 18, 06:46
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As the 2010 Winter Olympics start, it is nice to know that the application controlling the thousands of LEDs of the Vancouver Olympic Rings was written in Delphi (although I could not find an external source, I spoke with one of the actual developers). The application controls the ultra-low consumption LED lamps and (as you can see in the video below) can change the color of each forming any kind of effect. You can also read an article here.