At Puur Data there is a PS4 in the office with a racing seat and F1 2017/2018. You already get quite a lot of information during the game, but we wanted to take it a step further. The PS4 game F1 2017/18 offers the possibility to send telemetry data via the UDP protocol. And let's just have a nice solution for collecting data. We have set up an Elasticsearch server with Elastic, Kibana and Logstash. We receive approximately 6000 log lines per round and each log line consists of approximately 100 variables. You have to think of tire temperature, position of the accelerator pedal, steering angle, engine status, brakes, etc. The complete list can be seen in the downloadable 'conf' file. So you receive an enormous amount of data that you can analyze and visualize (real-time). The example below shows a graph where the lap time, fuel level, engine temperature, acceleration and speed are plotted against time. If you simulate a race weekend you will receive approximately 150 million values!

– Linux server with Elastic, Kibana and Logstash;
– Playstation 4;
– Game F1 2017 or 2018;
– racing seat with steering wheel (that makes it more fun)
– The 'conf' file;
– Driver with ego who can take a dent (after all, everything can be analysed!).

Step 1 -> install the Elastic server

Provide a, preferably, Linux server with at least 4 GB internal memory, a few cores and sufficient disk space. Install Elastic, Kibana and Logstash on it. How this should be done is described on the website of elastic.

Step 2 -> download the 'conf' file HERE and modify it if necessary and make sure Logstash is started with this file.

Step 3 -> configure the UDP port and IP address on the Playstation in the game. This can be found in the screen when you press 'options' while driving. Make sure the IP address is the address of the server and the UDP port must match the one in the 'conf' file

The 'conf' file was created for F1 2017. This is a great example of how to collect and analyze real-time data. Good luck and have fun!