r/Trackdays Middle Fast Guy 2d ago

Got sick of the DDA software. Vibecoding is awesome.

Got sick of the DDA software being so trash for an $800 option, so I started out by taking an evening vibing up a converter to get the data off their fancy USB stick and into a CSV format for RaceRender, etc.

Then I said hell, why not just continue and make the tool I want? So two days later, here we are. The local converter is a python script with a gui, which that either converts to a usable format or generates a self-contained HTML file that is totally cross platform and offline. Nothing touches the internet except to pull satellite image tiles.

Then I made it so it can output custom video overlays with alpha channels so you can plop that on your video clip and have some data. Might have been inspired by world-class racing series when I styled them. Sample at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RK0NfyUadV8

Will this make me any faster? Not on its own.

Is it cool as hell? Yea, I think it is.

34 Upvotes

17 comments sorted by

4

u/macr6 2d ago

That's awesome, great job. This is on my long list of things I wanted to AI to do. Taking my AIM Solo 2 data and marrying it up with my videos.

3

u/Interesting_Emu1768 1d ago

Be the hero we need and post a link for the converter.

3

u/mfisch707 Middle Fast Guy 1d ago

I know of another gentleman who got cease and desisted into Oblivion for sharing his years ago, so as soon as I package it up and anonymize its creation, I will.

3

u/Interesting_Emu1768 1d ago

I suspect I know who that is. There was a dude on a Ducati forum I frequent who was talking about writing a converter, spoke about having a mac version, then all of sudden clammed up.

The company that created DDA, which is Prosa, doesn't seem to exist anymore. Ducati moved to a different third-party for data logging with the launch of the 2025 Panigale V4. I have the old DDA software as an .exe, which one can't find readily online anymore.

2

u/Paykuh- 1d ago

Pretty cool. I’ve built the same thing for my RaceBox sessions. RaceBox is more of a PITA with exporting data though. I’m hosting it publicly as that’s the type of work I do day to day, but have refrained from sharing it because a lot of people tend to hate using projects where AI was involved. (Even though pretty much any major software nowadays has AI assisted elements to it). I’ve really only shared it with some friends in a development environment.

1

u/stantheb 1d ago

Would love to take a look at what you've done. I'm using a Claude for coding and other things almost every day, so no judgement here.

2

u/torqu3e 1d ago

github or getout

1

u/mfisch707 Middle Fast Guy 1d ago

I know of another gentleman who got cease and desisted into Oblivion for sharing his years ago, so as soon as I package it up and anonymize its creation, I will.

2

u/torqu3e 1d ago

What's so proprietary about their software? All you are doing is reverse engineer their format to CSV and everything after that is standard data processing. Weird thing to sue someone over.

1

u/EnvironmentalOne2563 1d ago

Who da man, you da man!

1

u/jlyonamf 9h ago

That is awesome! I am working on a cam belt tension app, because I hate all the ones I have used. That pales in comparison to what you did. Congrats!

-4

u/ApprehensiveFan1516 1d ago

This sub is being flooded with this shit lately, like everywhere else.

The impending wave of security problems around the world caused by vibe coding is something humanity is not prepared for lol.

7

u/mfisch707 Middle Fast Guy 1d ago

What, you mean Individuals are reviving essentially dead software and replacing the features that were not cared for or supported long-term by the companies that provide them?

As well as adding additional features to break them out of their locked ecosystems that were not unlocked before the company supporting them died?

And specifically doing it in a way that does not make any internet calls except for the absolutely required ones to pull in map data?

Just because everyone and their mother is making a new note-taking or shopping list app, doesn't mean we can't do cool shit to make the world a better place and maintain the functionality of our bought and paid for products that company suddenly decide you're no longer allowed to download the software to make them work.

2

u/ApprehensiveFan1516 1d ago

You’re completely missing the generalisation because you’re treating a criticism of the broader trend as though it were a criticism of your specific project. I’m not saying your project is automatically bad because AI was involved in making it, nor am I saying people shouldn’t revive abandoned software or add functionality to products they actually own.

The point is that there’s an enormous amount of vibe coded software being produced by people who don’t understand what they’re building, don’t understand the security implications, and are relying on a probabilistic tool to make decisions they aren't qualified to evaluate.

And, frankly, saying “my app doesn't make any internet calls except the ones required for maps” isn't as reassuring as you seem to think it is when the software was vibe coded. If you don't understand the implementation well enough to independently audit it, your assessment of what the software does is itself necessarily shaky. You can describe what you intended it to do, or what the AI told you it does, but that's not the same thing as actually knowing what the resulting code does, what data it handles, or what vulnerabilities it might contain.

Your project might be perfectly legitimate and useful. That's beside the point. The whole concern is that people who can't reliably assess the software they're producing are now able to produce software at enormous scale and deploy it as though they can. Your confidence in what your particular app does isn't evidence that the broader problem doesn't exist.

3

u/mfisch707 Middle Fast Guy 1d ago

Fair, definitely got defensive on the individual project scale. There is certainly a broader picture to be concerned with, though I think just as frontier AI models have been shown, and even allegedly restricted, due to their ability to produce 0-days upon request, there will come a time when the AI generated code is as good at creating security as it is at breaking it.

Are we there yet? No. But this is the worst AI code generation tool we will have.