Some of you will already know that I am a massive fan of the racing simulator iRacing. I signed up to this "game" a couple of years ago and it's lead to the purchase of new computers, steering wheels and even a dedicated "racing seat".
What I've always wanted to do was build a basic motion rig for the game, something that at least would represent lateral acceleration to give me a better idea of my grip limits when driving. The first step towards this is parsing the telemetry from the game.
iRacing has a telemetry API that's solely documented in the manner of a demo client built from a pile of C code. Whilst I am certainly capable of programming in C, my preference is definitely my pet language, Python. Some brave souls have built clients in C#, but that isn't much better *
Aside from my own bias, Python is a really nice language to use as a new programmer, so developing this client should allow for more people to develop iRacing add-ons which can only be a good thing!
Anyway, I decided to build a Python implementation of a client for iRacing. The API uses a memory mapped file, something Python happily supports out of the box, as well as C data structures for all the high-frequency telemetry which I was able to parse using Python's struct module.
As I was secretly hoping, Python's dynamic-programming abilities allowed me to write a client in short order, using very little code.
The code's right here on GitHub. It's, honestly, quite rough-and-ready, but it works. Please do let me know if you have success or problems with it, I'll do my best to help out. I expect it'll be updated regularly, or whenever I find a bug...
You'll have to extend and modify it to work with your application, but that's half the fun - enjoy! :)
* Whilst I'm not a huge fan of C#, the in-line debugging/inspection functionality in Visual Studio was a god-send when applied it to the C# demo client.
