The talks are split up now - I'm watching Alfred Wullschleger talk about the heating control system he uses to run his house - which he wrote himself in VisualWorks.

It's a commercially built control unit, so it's not a homebrew, one-off kind of thing. What was the motivation? The control unit that shipped with the unit wasn't running efficiently, and Alfred likes to tinker with hardware - so using a standard PC with USB interface, he was able to simulate the unit in Smalltalk, and, via DLLCC, hook up to the C API.

• Interface to the hardware via a DLL for the Minilab 1008
• All control done in Smalltalk
• User Interface in Smalltalk
• Sockets for remote operation
• Simulation of all hardware
• Uses an energy flow model
• Runs 10x faster than the real system!

The end result is that he has a headless image on the boiler connected computer, and he can remotely control it via any system on his LAN.