Archived Project
Before TRACE,
There Was GTRAS.
The About page tells the short version of this. Here's the fuller one — what the project actually was, why it never worked, and why most of it isn't here.
The About page tells the short version of this. Here's the fuller one — what the project actually was, why it never worked, and why most of it isn't here.
TRACE didn't start as a telemetry dashboard. It started as GTRAS — a project to automate driving in GT7. The plan had three pieces: read the game's live telemetry off the PS4's UDP broadcast, record a clean reference lap from it, and use a Raspberry Pi Pico wired in as a USB input device to play that lap back to the console — steering, throttle, braking — so the console would see it as a real controller. A separate mode used the same Pico wiring to hold full throttle through a specific race unattended, looping it overnight for in-game credits.
The telemetry-reading half only existed to feed the other two pieces. Everything that eventually became this project — the live dashboard, the lap analyst, the whole idea of recording and comparing laps — was originally just the data-collection layer for a bot.
To be direct about this, because the project's own internal notes at the time were more optimistic than the reality: none of it ever ran end-to-end. The Pico wouldn't reliably execute its own firmware — not intermittently, it simply refused — and hours spent wiring a powered USB hub and troubleshooting never turned up why. The lap-replay driving never worked. The credit-farming loop never ran as a finished, working thing, whatever an earlier roadmap document optimistically called "ready to test." Later ideas on top of that — spin recovery, automated pit stops, full race automation — were never built at all.
The bot got scrapped. The telemetry recorder underneath it didn't — it kept getting built out on its own until it was the entire project.
This page exists so the project has an honest paper trail — not to hand anyone a working copy of the automation side. So the Pico firmware, the PC-to-Pico control code, the setup guides, and the recorded lap files meant for replay are not included. Automating gameplay that way — including unattended credit farming — runs against Gran Turismo's and PlayStation Network's terms of service, on top of never having actually worked.
One piece of GTRAS owed nothing to the Pico or the bot: the plain telemetry reader. UDP capture, Salsa20 decryption, a small Tkinter viewer for speed/RPM/gear/tyres, and a basic lap recorder to JSON. No hardware, no automation, no bot — it's what the About page means by "the telemetry recorder didn't go away." That's the only code from this era published here.