I have a really interesting problem I'm trying to solve and with which I could use some help. It has to do with a new device I'm trying to figure out how to build which would track the performance of racing cars while they are on-track, in real time.

A small team of us have already solved some of the core problems and have built a prototype of the device, but there are a number of important related problems left to solve.

And, for that, I'm turning to...maybe you.

Let me say up front that this is being done on a shoestring budget, which means I don't have a big pile of investor money lying around to pay a staff with. In fact, I don't even have a small pile of investor money lying around, so fair warning.

But, having said that, the problems are interesting and incredibly real-world, and if you are a computery car guy (or gal) like I am, you may find them rather compelling.

What I'm hoping to find are a few people with great skill sets who are willing to work with me to solve some of our core challenges. Specifically, I'm hoping to find skills in...

• Relational databases. We are planning to collect data several times per second for every car on the track (which might be 60 or more) for as long as they are on the track (which is usually less than 60 minutes but might be for as long as 25 hours or more). It's a lot of lines of data.
  
  Given all that data, we have specific analyses we want to do both within the data coming from a single vehicle and across the data from all the vehicles. The challenges here tend to be in the analysis of the data more than its collection or organization...at least, I think so.
  
  
• Wireless data transfer. We'd like to be able to collect all of the data mentioned above on a per-lap basis, while cars are still on the track. Presumably that means from a single collection point in the pits or somewhere similar. The amount of data collected from a single car from a single lap is relatively small, probably in the range of 100K or less, but racing cars can come past in packs. With Spec Miatas, for instance, you might have 40 of them on the same straight at the same time running 4-wide, so there are challenges like that which will have to be handled. The collected data will go directly into the relational database.
  
  
• Physics and math. Ultimately, what we're doing here is related to the practical application of physics and while I was once pretty good at both math and physics, I was also once pretty young. Unfortunately, I'm no longer any of these even though I can kinda remember what each of them was about, but not at a useful enough level to be able to adequately use that knowledge.
  
  What we need here is somebody with a strong understanding of the physics related to converting the data we can collect from a moving vehicle (time, locaton, speed, etc) into the numbers we need to come out the other end. I don't want to go into a lot of detail here as this is perhaps the most important part of the project, but there are several twists that could make this very interesting and/or challenging work.
  

As I said earlier, this is work I can't really pay for right now but I would be willing to consider some other kind of reasonable compensation at the back end, if there turns out to be one. To be clear, though, I'm not looking to develop an open-source solution even though I would be very happy to use open-source tools.

If this is something you think you might be interested in contributing to, I would love to have a chat with you about it. Drop me a line at sgood@goodaero.com.

Thank for considering it!

I recently spent a few days in Washington, DC (well, okay, technically it was Arlington, Virginia, but you get the idea) at The View's Admin/Dev conference renewing friendships and speaking on a range of getting-you-ready-for-XPages topics. I promised to post the presentations and the demo databases. You can find them here:

• CSS and HTML
• JavaScript for LotusScript developers (no demo db for this)
• Server-Side JavaScript for the Timid

Enjoy!