Coding Challenge: Inverted Pendulum

[Thoric]

I'd love to have a go at this, but I can't because I literally have zero time to spare these days, and I reckon something like this requires some serious study. I've been waiting for the latest NI Challenge for a long time, and now it's here I can't play

[Ben]

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@Thoric wrote:

I'd love to have a go at this, but I can't because I literally have zero time to spare these days, and I reckon something like this requires some serious study. I've been waiting for the latest NI Challenge for a long time, and now it's here I can't play

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My team mate has followed his better half to the west coast and I may be at a loss myself. So if I scared anyone off...

Ben

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@Thoric wrote:

I'd love to have a go at this, but I can't because I literally have zero time to spare these days, and I reckon something like this requires some serious study. I've been waiting for the latest NI Challenge for a long time, and now it's here I can't play

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[BruceAmmons]

Sigh.  So is anybody working on a solution for the challenge?  Did anybody consider it but decide it was too much work?  Would it help if I provided some strong hints on swing up theory?  I assume nobody would have a problem keeping it inverted since there are several examples of that in the CD & SIM module.  If you don't know where to start on the swing up, I can provide some help.

Bruce

[Thoric]

As a Mechanical Engineer by education, I'm fairly certain the theory would be relatively easy to implement, but if I enter a competition it will be to try to win, so I wouldn't be happy with just 'an implementation'. I'd want to create something advanced enough to stand a decent chance of beating everyone else, and that takes time - which I really don't have

On the other hand, maybe I could push aside my other personal projects for a little while...

[altenbach]

Bruce, is there something wrong with the toolkit download?

It is supposed to be 322MB, but when I try to download it, it stops after ~13MB (tried several times). So I assume it might be a downloader.

Still, when I try to run it, Windows 7 claims that "LV2009CDSIM.exe is not a valid w32 application".

Does this download actually work for anyone else?

[Intaris]

I would just like to confess at this point in time that I've read the challenge and read through this thread but I have no idea what the challenge is about.....

Don't mind me, I'm just an observer.

Shane.

[Intaris]

OK, saw the videos and I think I understand a little now.

Looks interesting.

Shane

[BruceAmmons]

Christian,

I had a similar problem recently on a different web site.  When downloading using Explorer, the download stopped before finishing the download.  The solution was to use Firefox, which downloaded the entire file perfectly.  You might want to try a different browser and see if that helps.  Beyond that, Javier will have to look in to it on the NI side.

Bruce

[Thoric]

Altenbach,

I downloaded all the SP1 updates, and most of them were downloaders. The downloaders themselves nearly always failed to produce a valid win32 file! I had to run most of them three or four times to get a valid file. The annoyance is that there's no way to know if it's worked or not until you finish the download

In the end, I've not been able to get the SIM tookit downloaded, so I've used the original LV 2009 toolkit. Which is presumably buggy, but at least installs ok onto LV 2009 SP1 (it seems).

[Ben]

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@Bruce Ammons wrote:

Sigh.  So is anybody working on a solution for the challenge?  Did anybody consider it but decide it was too much work?  Would it help if I provided some strong hints on swing up theory?  I assume nobody would have a problem keeping it inverted since there are several examples of that in the CD & SIM module.  If you don't know where to start on the swing up, I can provide some help.

Bruce

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I can't admit that the math* is over my head since theoretically I should be able to handle it but it has been quite a few years since I had to model a system since that is the domain of my customers. So my inital work will be to understand what is happening in the model and figuring out what I need to do to get what I need.

So any hints could only help me remember what I had to do.

I suspect the lower the math bar is the more people that can play along.

Ben

* I was approached to add Math as a major when I was in school. I was flattered but my advisor suggested that adding math on top of E-Physics was pushing it. The last person to comment on my math abilities was CC when he saw me trying to take the log of a negative number and make sense of it. Since then I have left that gun in the box.