4 ms·

What is coin in this context CoolGuySteve ? (HFT ?)

lmilcin 6y ago
He meant algorithmic trading which is close (but not exactly the same) as high frequency trading. HFT is obsessed with latency. Algorithmic trading is mostly about automating wishes of a trader because if he can execute his strategy faster he gets a bit of an additional edge. The coin I mentioned is completely different area. This was for a fixed odds betting terminal. The company ported their software from RTOS to Linux but they had issue with occasionally missing events generated by their custom hardware board controlling the device. This being betting terminal caused grief to customers and unhappy customers == no income. I was contracted to solve this issue for them which I figured out would be to write a proper kernel driver for their board, restructuring of their existing code and to tune their Linux kernel/configuration. The device they used as coin acceptor was very cheap (one figures for a device that returned its cost in couple days of operation...) and it had no controller, just analog output. The output would show the current value of something related to the induced current in the coin while the coin is falling through a piece of tubing inside an energized coil. The software has to probe the value in regular intervals while the coin is passing the sensor, and then classify as one of the possible coins or an unknown object based on duration, strength and profile of the signal. This relates to the dimensions and materials used to build the coin. The precision at which you perform the measurements greatly influences precision of detection of various types of coins and it allows tighter tolerances which helps prevents fraud. Once the coin passes the detector it has couple centimeters before it arrives at a gate which sorts the coins to their possible destinations. The software has to periodically (multiple times a millisecond) monitor the value of the analog value, and then has couple milliseconds to decide what the coin is and send command to the gate. There is not much to it unless you have some other interrupt completely disrupting the process and this is the part they could not figure out how to solve. The calculations are not complex and there is plenty of time to perform them. I suggested they can easily implement it on their board and return buffer of all values to their Linux but they told me they have huge amount of these machines in the field and they don't want new design for their controller.

He meant algorithmic trading which is close (but not exactly the same) as high frequency trading. HFT is obsessed with latency. Algorithmic trading is mostly about automating wishes of a trader because if he can execute his strategy faster he gets a bit of an additional edge. The coin I mentioned is completely different area. This was for a fixed odds betting terminal. The company ported their software from RTOS to Linux but they had issue with occasionally missing events generated by their custom hardware board controlling the device. This being betting terminal caused grief to customers and unhappy customers == no income. I was contracted to solve this issue for them which I figured out would be to write a proper kernel driver for their board, restructuring of their existing code and to tune their Linux kernel/configuration. The device they used as coin acceptor was very cheap (one figures for a device that returned its cost in couple days of operation...) and it had no controller, just analog output. The output would show the current value of something related to the induced current in the coin while the coin is falling through a piece of tubing inside an energized coil. The software has to probe the value in regular intervals while the coin is passing the sensor, and then classify as one of the possible coins or an unknown object based on duration, strength and profile of the signal. This relates to the dimensions and materials used to build the coin. The precision at which you perform the measurements greatly influences precision of detection of various types of coins and it allows tighter tolerances which helps prevents fraud. Once the coin passes the detector it has couple centimeters before it arrives at a gate which sorts the coins to their possible destinations. The software has to periodically (multiple times a millisecond) monitor the value of the analog value, and then has couple milliseconds to decide what the coin is and send command to the gate. There is not much to it unless you have some other interrupt completely disrupting the process and this is the part they could not figure out how to solve. The calculations are not complex and there is plenty of time to perform them. I suggested they can easily implement it on their board and return buffer of all values to their Linux but they told me they have huge amount of these machines in the field and they don't want new design for their controller.