1.4 KiB
1.4 KiB
| title | description | date | projectPeriod | thumbnail | tags | role | stack | outcome | audience | links | ||||||||||
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| A Unity City Where Bad PLC Code Made Cars Crash | A REST-controlled traffic-light sim for a cybersecurity event. Bad PLC code showed up as car crashes, the most honest feedback loop I've shipped. | 2026-05-01 | July-August 2018 |
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Simulation author |
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Visible consequences for an otherwise abstract PLC challenge | technical |
A small city in Unity where the traffic lights were driven by a REST API. Contestants in a PLC cybersecurity event would write control logic; bad logic made cars crash, and they'd watch it happen.
Three things are worth saying about it:
- Visual feedback was the whole point. Most security challenges punish wrong answers with a red "incorrect." This one punished them with car wrecks, and people learned faster.
- Server-client, all decisions on the server. Every agent's behaviour was computed centrally and broadcast. The harder problem wasn't simulation; it was getting the broadcast to be fault-tolerant on the conference Wi-Fi without flooding it.
- Built it solo, including the models and animations in Blender. Not a flex, just context for why everything's a little janky.
There was also a HUD overlay for tweets, which felt clever at the time and dated horribly. Skip that part.