Review Road Vibrations

There is road surface vibrations... if you use fast servomotors... for such I recommend the AMC-AASD15A servo controller that have 2ms response timing and can be used on PT-ACTUATOR actuators...

See this video with LFS:

it is not easy to see if it is road vibrations or car mouvement.

to see the vibrations, the small vibrations should be measured for example if the engines move in neutral, with the engine vibrations.
the surface of the road are really hard to feel.
the passage grass / road but the road vibrations very difficult.

if game vibe sent the information on the engines , we could measure the difference.
what is it ? road vibrations ? it is not easy to see :


with GameVibe and a BTK, it's much more powerful!
Buttkicker LFE 5 /200 Hz

Just to level with your simulator performance...
Simple AC motors and VFD inverters are too slow to pass higher frequencies vibrations than 3 to 5hz...

Servomotors are capable of 500hz vibrations if they are low amplitude...!!!

We are discussing to be able to output Gamevibe directly to motor data, but only fast enough motors could benefit...!

Thanks
Thanos

Thats interesting Thanos. I've no idea then if prosimu actuators can do this.

Obviously our PRS 200 actuators could simulate vibrations. It's just a question of simtools coding. Once Simtools have this evolution : your could feel the vibration of the motor... ;-)

Thanks

Patrick

Wow thanks for showing that Thanos, looks awesome ... So keen to get my PT actuators setup and try this ... Still waiting for my Trakracer TR160 though.

Tell me if I'm wrong - meximal vibration frequency depends on game simulation frequency. If a game outputs telemetry at 60Hz (every 16ms) you won't be able to reproduce vibration greater that 30Hz (33ms period). Now I'm thinking that if a game would output surface ID one could map that ID to some kind of signal generator that would be able to simulate vibrations at higher frequencies but still you would be tied to how fast positional data is pushed to the driver board (from PC to AMCAASD15A for example). But It seems that higher vibrations put all mechanical parts into stress thus causing faster wear over time thus I would use a bass shaker to reproduce vibrations higher than let's say those 5Hz.

how do you know that?
I can not find the information, I would like to know the way to calculate this with my frequency converter:
I have the Omron mini J7 and the Yaskawa J1000

it's interesting to see the vibrations alone, but I wonder what is really going on when you send these vibrations and at the same time all the information of the game, vibrations of the road continuously with other big information. displacement, all this happening at the same time without loss?


I like to compare it to a 3-way speaker for example.
how does a loudspeaker manage to reproduce the whole range of frequencies?
we add speakers for each function, tweeter for treble or boomer for bass.
there are full range speakers but it is really less good.
I would like to see the results of your video and at the same time that you send larger displacement information.

All the effects happening at the same time is no problem as long as the sample frequency is greater than twice the highest frequency you want to reproduce. But waveforms that are sums of other waveforms happen all the time. If you look at the lowly square wave, mathematically it is no different than a sine wave at the fundamental frequency and all the odd harmonics added in. A single speaker can do a pretty decent job of replicating the waveforms of every instrument in an orchestra and a host of vocalists, all at the same time. The waveforms are just added together. We still can hear and discern the individual instruments and vocalists.

But for motion sims, depending on the frequency response of the different bits - motors, shakers, whatever - it makes sense to use each for their best response. If you have fast motors, solid linkages, and such, motors can do vibrations up to whatever frequency limit they can follow. Or, as in my case, I have worm drive motors that aren't fast enough to reproduce vibration so I added shakers that can (and do ;-).

thank you, I have the same problem with my AC motors , and the buttkicker LFE do a very good job !


an important thing is missing in Simtools, a frequency generator which would allow to send movement sequences at frequencies for example from 1 to 200hz to test and verify the response of the motors. this would make it possible to check and perhaps improve the settings of the drivers.

Vibration is possible with servomotors, even if using worm gearboxes.

See this video, where Mike has 2-stage worm gearboxes on his servos, you can see clearly the larger amplitude vibrations visible on camera at minute 3:35 where he is taking of:




His platform weights about 2000lbs btw...

@Thanos - when you talk of having fast actuators and you mention the AMC-AASD15A and PT-Actuators, are our 250mm/s units going to be 'fast' enough for producing these vibration effects when we have such a thing in SimTools?
With my current settings I get a lot of fast, seemingly accurate information in iRacing, but there is always just that little something lacking, and that's vibrations from road surface, rumble strips etc.

Hopefully my PT setup will be fast enough

Have you tried 'SimTools_CurveGenerator'? FlyPT also has frequency gen tools.

@Thanos - Certainly you can have actuators reproduce vibrations if the gearing and linkages are tight and the motors are powerful and fast enough, but that gets hard at our scales and costs. Fast movements and changes in directions require more powerful motors and more current. Some already have to run from batteries and charge between sessions because they don’t have the power available for their sims as they are.

I’d love to have anti-backlash gears in my worm gear actuators because stock, I can sit in my sim seat and rock slightly. Even if my motors were powerful enough to faithfully reproduce small amplitude vibrations, the backlash in the gearing makes it impossible. If I was able to get rid of the backlash in the gearing, I would still need bigger and more powerful motors to reproduce those fast motions under load. But bass shakers can simulate the fast, low amplitude vibrations while the motors handle the large amplitude stuff.

I think a lot of us are constrained out of those kinds of rigs. When you are constrained to use motors and linkages that are more marginal, they can still do the large motions but it makes sense to let smaller, purpose-built actuators do the vibrations and impulses. It can reduce costs, power demands, and size.

But certainly, if you have the power, motors, gears, and linkages that allow it, it’s a thing of beauty.

@riton - Is this what you are looking for?

https://www.xsimulator.net/community/threads/output-a-sinusoid.10283/

I run 25:1 gearboxes and 800w motors, the vibration is clearly detectable

I am not sure all linear actuators are cable of moving fast enough to simulate road vibration

@Zed - great post, I think I understood a bit of what you were talking about.

I'm sure that these vibrations can be a feature that one can turn on/off as required/wanted.

More and more people are getting into simulation and higher end setups with DD wheels and high end pedal sets.
It's important that our Simtools/Thanos setups have the vibration options that can be used by systems that can benefit from it.
This feature is still one of D-Box's advantages over most of our systems, and I think D-Box know that they have to be far more competitive on pricing that they have ben - the new Gen3 actuators are significantly less expensive than previous generations, so they must be feeling pressure.

Excited to see how this is implemented in SimTools V3 - Dustin had previously indicated that it's something that hopefully should be part of the new version, and I'm sure he realizes that it's something that can only be used on certain motion builds, and will provide an option to use it or not, perhaps even have levels of vibration effects so that all can benefit to the limits of their setups.

an alternative is a motor with an eccentric weight - get it to vibrate based on simhub data

That sounds interesting! Care to share a link to appropriate forum so I can go check it out and learn some more?