Showroom No-Weld 2DOF Seat Mover On Homebrew Ricmotech RS1 Clone

Thanks for the lightening quick response, that makes sense.

The more I read the more questions I have. You mention that you are going to short the lever arms on the motor to give them more of a mechanical advantage. You also mentioned that you are going to limit the side to side movement.

Will these go "hand in hand," meaning you will measure (or determine by trial and error) what length will give you the desired motion and limit the side to side movement mechanically, or will you go with the shortest arm possible and dial in the movement with programming? (Is programming the correct word?)

If I think I need shorter arms, I have about 3/4" of room in the existing arms that I can just drill new mounting holes to attach to the motor hub, so that's what I'll do before making something completely new. Shorter arms will restrict movement in all directions, but I still will use software to allow for full range of motion for pitch but decreased roll, since with the location of the tie-rod mounting points the amount of roll is exaggerated.

So it's been a bit since I've had an update; where we left off was me realizing 400w isn't enough power for my needs and a broken potentiometer after testing. Part of it was due to waiting 14 days on a power supply to be delivered, then as soon as it showed up I had some family health issues that took priority of my time. I'm hoping to make a good bit of progress over the next week, I'm feeling like I'm in the final stretch now! I also think that with THIS post I will earn enough points to grab the simtools plugins I need

I mentioned earlier that the pinout that the SMC3 software requires prevented me from using the monster moto as a shield, so I ended up getting a second protoshield board and made a little wiring harness up so that the pinout matches and I can still have everything quick-separable in shield form if I decide to change any parts out down the road.





As for the power supply, I purchased a Dell 2950 750w (actually, two of them but will only be using one) as recommended elsewhere on this forum. I did the fan mod (since the fan at full speed sounds like a jet taking off in my room) and connected it up to my kill switch using some braided lamp cord I had laying around, makes the kill switch look like it does more than just act as a jumper across pins on the supply....

I will also have it plugged into a powerstrip that I will turn off when not in use, since it seems to still draw enough current to stay mildly warm to the touch without being turned on.




Total $ at this stage: I don't want to remind myself! Somewhere around $500.

Motor controller and arduino componets all placed inside an old power supply box. New Dell 2950 server power supply for providing 750w of power, I have a second I might run in parallel.



I gave up on the cheap potentiometers I was using before, they kept flaking out in the middle of test runs. New ones are MUCH higher quality!


There's always something with this build to put me behind.... somehow one of the motors suffered from an internal short and overheats after just a minute of motion, new motor on order. This is the primary suspect for an issue I posted about in the Q&A section where my power supply to keep shutting off intermittently

Hey Noor, thanks for the comment! Today made it all worth it, I was able to get about a minute of riding in the seat while the AI raced before the bad motor started to seize and it was really something else! I know I don't have anything dialed in right, but I feel like it really has a lot of potential.

I'm having an issue with simtools not saving any of my settings when I close out, does anyone happen to know what could be causing this?


Here's a video I took of AI driving with movement at 70% and axis restricted to 80%; watching the video back I can tell that pitch is reversed and definitely weighted too high, so I'll be adjusting that for the next test run

DO NOT use AI to test tune tune your gear, AI code in most games have VERY different inputs compared to real human inputs, Ya its ok for a quick check of thing's...but overall base your profile on YOUR driving, Not the AI.

Test ONE axis at a time, Yes it feels lame and dull at first, but once you turn them ALL back on, its an amazing feeling for the first time.

Keep at it, your ohh soo close.

Well, everything is saving just fine today. Not sure what changed, I even tried rebooting multiple times last night. Maybe I was too tired and forgot to hit the save button
Looking back, I may have mistaken the interface settings page not loading a default preset after first launch as "not saving my settings", but after selecting the preset I created last night it all loads right up.

Good advice, I'm using the AI so that I can just get an idea of what it all looks like and make sure I don't have any binding while I wait on a replacement motor that doesn't burn up as soon as it has load.

I'm working my way through the FAQ steps to make a motion profile and I'll go one step at a time starting with surge

The new motor came in and I got it all wired up and installed, fixed the overheating and motor fade issues right up!

I spent some time last night trying to get a decent tune set up.
These screenshots are more for my reference so I can use them as values to roll back to for a base-line tune.


For the tuning center for Assetto Corsa, I settled on these values



For the axis assignments I'm testing out these values





With axis limiting set to 65%


And game main level 70%



It's recommended to keep the overall tune at 100% per axis max, so I will be revisiting that to balance everything out so that the main level can go up to 100%


I took these settings out for a test ride on the ring, here's a video of my first lap with motion where I wasn't focused on trying to tune settings:
The amount of motion FEELS like so much more inside of VR, I may end up dialing some settings back. Advice is welcome!

It's interesting how precise the seat/head movements show in that video! Makes me all the more anxious to get mine done. Really looks fantastic!

Just curious, are you going to do the motion cancellation add-on?

Pitch and Roll are Way too high in the Tuning center, Pitch roll and Sway are 3 you really want nice and linear. No herky jerky movements.

Also Nords is Not a Recommended Base line for setup, It has multiple quirks about it that renders it not usable. Tho there are many tracks that will offer you places to test Said pitch and roll, Spa for example where you can park sideways @ Eau Rouge, that will show you a Max example of what roll could be. Stop On eau rouge, That will show you a Max Pitch situation. IMO 8 is the ideal number for AC for pitch and roll. Yes you might have a situation where an 8 will clip some data, but lets be honest here, were circuit racing, if you got THAT much angle and lean on the car, your doing it all wrong, lol

Imo you need to get rid of the Axis limiting and run that profile @ 100% ANYthing under 100% is SEVERELY limiting the data coming in and i HIGHLY suggest you go back to 100 and re tune. use the Profile editor to tune cars/tracks, Not the Main slider.

PS time for some seat belts.

I don't think I will be adding VR motion cancelation, it all seemed pretty natural feeling with head jerking around in real life causing the same movement in the car. I'm wondering if the motion cancelation is mostly for 3dov where there is up/down movement?

I did my tuning on other tracks, mostly Mugello, then after it felt dialed in moved to Nords. I'll adjust my pitch and roll, they are only taking up a small percentage of the axis, most of the movement I seem to like feeling so far is from surge/sway/heave and I kind of stopped messing with pitch/roll and focused on the others. I trust your advice and I'll drop them down and see how that feels this evening, thanks!

As far as the axis limiting inside the game engine, if I set it to 100, my motors will rotate past the 'max-up' and 'max-down' rotations in extreme cases, it's a 270deg pot and I only want max 90deg rotation off of center in either direction, so ~15% soft-limit on each end. That's what I was using the axis limiter for, is there somewhere else the soft-limits on the motors should be set? Just lower percentages in the axis settings or something else?


I agree about a seatbelt, just threw a basic 4 point in my amazon cart

So I set the main output to 100%, left the axis limits at 65%, and WOW the amount of detail in the motion is incredible! I thought it would just be more aggressive but it does actually seem to add a good bit of detail. I also changed the pitch and roll values as @Nick Moxley recommended and that also made a great improvement to the immersion. Thanks again for the tips!

BUT, any time I have the main output above 70% or so, I get motor shutoff issues. for one motor. See the video below (No, I don't always wear the same shorts, this is from the same night as the previous video when I tested 100% output ), but basically when there's a rapid change in axis position being sent the motor just shuts off. It's definitely a software shutoff because once I manually move the arm back to the top position and then slowly back down to where it SHOULD be, as soon as I get to the spot where it should be on the way back down the controller engages and takes back over.
Anyone have any ideas on this?

Motor shut down's are highly suspect of inadequate Pid setting's combines with some potential EMI, combines with Crappy thin USB cables with out Ferrite cores on them. Start with trying to re tune your motor's and increase your tuning center a tick on things like heave and surge, The shut down happens at the gear shift. and do you have 1 psu or 2 ?

I am running only one 750w PSU with one monster moto running both motors. 30 amp fuse between the PSU and the moto monster which hasn't popped so I don't think I'm pushing the limits of the PSU.

These are the settings I have in SMC3, same for both motors. It's too late at night to mess around with changing any tonight, if there's anything that stands out let me know. The deadzone and Fpid are set how they are to reduce motor noise when stationary, same with such a high PWMmin (15 is where the motors move without load, 90 to move with weight in the seat). Nothing else had much thought put behind it.

While I'm working to diagnose the motor shutoff issue and also find a way to more securely attach the hub to the motor shaft (my setscrews have some play in them, thinking loctite 620 for the shaft and blue loctite on the bolt thread), I decided to do something to make forward progress instead of spinning my wheels. I needed a way to cool the motors a little bit for longer sessions since they are warm to the touch after 30 minutes.

So I designed some fan standoffs that clamp to the motors and a coworker 3d printed them for me. My first 3d print, it's so cool!
Yes, I took a spare motor to work just to test the fit and take a picture....

I had a similar problem with my rig with regards to motor shutoffs, and exactly the same symptom of having the motor turn on if moved back to the zero point. If the motor has to rapidly switch directions under heavy load it will draw a large surge current for a short period of time (the reasons are a bit complicated, but it can be up to twice the rated motor current for a few milliseconds).
If I had to bet on what's happening I'd say that when you change directions rapidly that current surge is causing the over-current protection on the motor driver to trip, and the driver doesn't re-enable itself until the PWM drops back to zero (which will happen if you move the shaft manually back to the setpoint).

There are two easy ways to fix this. First, you can slowly lower your PWMmax value until you find a value where the overcurrent won't trip, or if you have another MM lying around, you can change your wiring a bit, and use one MM per motor (as per this post: https://www.xsimulator.net/communit...cts-as-a-single-motor-driver-more-power.5482/).

I have one MM per motor, and I still can't raise my PWMmax over about 230 otherwise what you described will happen, but my motors are driving a fairly large frame.

Thanks for the advice. I'll try dropping the pwmax down and see if that fixes it and the motors still have an acceptable amount of power, and if not I think I have one good spare MM to try the 2 MM setup