Midway Mania Part Deux

Well, I had a hard time today figuring out what to go with.  I have a cool article in from a UK publication on the Disney Company and Bob Iger and Tom Stagg's work on raising the 'value' of the company, or to go with a really GREAT article I found with lots more insider detail on how Midway Mania is put together.

Since I'm an engineer (and an Imagineer at heart), I think we'll lead today with the technical article.  The business climate will ALWAYS be there, my pursuit of an MBA non-withstanding of course.

Over at Design News they have a very cool article entitled 'Disney Rides on Wireless Ethernet' that goes into GREAT detail about how exactly TSMM is constructed. The cool thing is from our previous dissection of the ride from those console pictures, we were pretty darn close to right about the components in the ride system.

Here is a copy of the video on Mr. Potato Head that shows cameos by Don Rickles and several Imagineers like Kevin Rafferty.

We were right on with the Siemens' automated control systems link that we posted the other day, and in fact the system uses two different version of the SIMATIC family of control systems I pointed to in the previous article.  Specifically:

• They use a SIMATIC S7-319 controller, which is the most powerful controller in the 300 series to control the overall ride flow
• They then use a slightly less powerful SIMATIC S7-315 onboard each vehicle to manage the onboard ride systems (think motor, safety systems, etc.)

So the rest of this is what I can put together from the article and my own engineering and design background.  Some is truth, some educated conjecture on my part, so don't treat it as gospel!

Siemens uses what is called Industrial Ethernet for their family of automation control systems.  Some further investigation shows that this is standard ethernet as you and I know it, just 'hardened' for nasty, dirty, hot industrial climates like the power plant I used to work in. 

The plugs are different than the same Cat5/6 plugs you and I use, but that's for a number of probably obvious reasons:

• dirt
• moisture
• humidity
• temperature
• vibration

Just to name a few.  Industrial areas are nasty dirty and often times almost violent.  So you need a VERY positive interlock to make sure cables stay connected and communicating.  When things go down, it costs people money... BIG money. 

In the power plant I worked in, if the main boiler when offline and spun down the generators, it often took over 2 hours to get everything back online again.  2 hours in an industrial application when your not producing or having to buy something from someone else gets expensive really quickly.

So, the overall communication profile, as the headline points out, is using Ethernet as it's primary communication bus (vice a completely proprietary bus architecture like some PLC control systems still use).  And the ride makes extensive use of wireless from each of the the cars to the off board systems as well, just like you and I use at home only hardened.  But wireless isn't the ONLY method. 

The cool bus in the ride is using the track itself as one communications bus.  The ride systems broadcast using wireless and get updates via the track, which is probably generally continuous but electrically isolated into many zones.  That way the ride has a 'positive' control for movement from one zone to the next I suspect: no signal, no go.  Additionally the onboard controller can throw the ride into a 'stop' condition based on any number of onboard safety profiles while sending an update over wireless to the main system to slow or stop the rest of the ride (that's typically called exception or interrupt reporting/controlling). 

When the ride goes into a slow or stop profile, the controller alerts the game systems, which are a connected on that same Ethernet, but area a separate part of the architecture. 

How worried is Imagineering about knowing where your car is?  So worried in fact that they use two completely DIFFERENT methods for determining it:  one based on absolute proximity sensors in the floor so they know where the cars really are (that's probably what we saw on the operators display) and the other reads what is essentially a bar code on the floor to make sure you are lined up with the game screen within an inch of resolution.  Likewise, the position data from the cars is fed to the game system so the gaming system knows where your gun point is at in relation to the screen and how to make your darts appear to come from your gun and not someplace else in space.  That's pretty cool.

So there you have it, Disney moves their new ride systems into the 21st century.  In that way TSMM is as much about the cool attraction it is as it is a down payment on using new and current technologies for the future.  Think of it as the entertainment version of the industrial processes we all love to watch on the Science Channel's show 'How Things Are Made'.

Update:  Fixed a couple of typos