Question My 3DOF motion simulator

Got a new cytron motor shield and everything is working again. Played for a few hours and no issues so far. Started putting together front swivel for traction loss too.


Also got a most of the 8020 rig assembled. Definitely going to be a lot lighter and will be able to easily make adjustments to get COG perfect which it i think will help a lot. Second COVID shot is started to kick my ass so that about all I got in me today. Going to start welding bottom traction loss frame next week.

Got everything together for adding traction loss. Hopefully have some time to weld it up this weekend. Let me know what you guys think.

Finished welding frame and got her painted. traction loss is working but having issue with crank arm range of motion in smc3. Seems to max out around 90° instead of 180°. Any idea how to fix this?

Use 180 degree pots.

They are 320 degree pots

Ok, then ensure the pot is a centre (2.5V) when SM3 is showing centre.

Where do I find that 2.5v info?

Could you please elaborate on this when you get a chance. Im confused

You need to measure it at the center of the pot slider. The Ard supplies 5V to the pot so half way will be 2.5V.

So if it doesn't measure 2.5v at center the reason the motor arm isn't turning all the way is because the pot doesn't have enough voltage reaching it?

So for right now I ended up making the motor arm long to get more range of motion. Not sure why the traction loss range is so small. i moved the pot from the 3dof platform where it was able to rotate 180°, but same issue occurred when using it for traction loss. Moved it back to the 3dof and it was back to 180°. Not sure what's going on there.. other than that motion platform is working great. Just need to figure out power issue. I can play for about 3 minutes before tripping the circuit breaker.

A little bitter sweat feeling about posting this but I think I can officially call this project done. Want to thank everyone here that helped me get this beast running. Especially @noorbeast thanks for putting up with my frustrations and teaching me so much along the way. Couldn't have done it without you guys! Just working on fine tuning my motion profile now. Pretty stoked with it so far but still needs some tweaks. Below is my most recent video. Any feedback, questions or insight on its current movement and any possible areas of improvement you see would be much appreciated! So I guess its time to actually start playing the game now right?? Haha

Did you change your motors? They look different now.

Same motors as before. I did wrap them in copper tubing and attached heatsinks on the ends. That might be what you're seeing

Yes, now I see. Is the copper tubing mandatory too keep the motors cool?
It is hard to see in the video, but it looks like there is a strut in the middle to help keeping the weight up? Is it balanced, or do the motors have to carry most of the weight?
I like your rig. But it didn't come easy, as I've read.

No not mandatory. It was with the old motors but I replaced them. Had the copper tubing still so figured why not just to be safe. Yup I have a very small strut bar. Its just a pvc tube with springs in it. Doesn't really hold any weight up just kind of there for stabilization. I actually removed it because I don't it wasn't doing much.

Not sure where to put this so posting here. I've been working on perfecting my motion profile for Dirt Rally 2.0 and I'm pretty close to being happy with it. I have found that personally I do not like acceleration surge. It feels very unnatural and takes me out of the immersion. I do like braking surge as well as snappy gear changes in lower gears. So my question is is there a way to filter out the sustained tilt backwards you get while holding down the accelerator? I've tried all kinds of filters but can't seem to get it right. My surge tuning center values are max: min: and game engine is 25% for all 3 motors.

Side note: to get any decent (satisfactory) movement for my rig i need to set % in game engine a lot higher for surge, sway and tilt. Tilt being the biggest issue. Even when lowering tuning center tilt values way below capture values and using 50% axis allocation I need to either use washout gain of at least 2 or increasing pitch in the profile editor to around 35. Even then when going up a hill and hitting max tuning center value the rear motor arm doesn't use all the allocated axis when angling down, however it does while angling up when going downhill (front 2 motors work as they should). Sway and surge need higher allocations as well but for a different reason. Take sway for instance. If set to 20% there is almost no motion output from the rig but if I move it up to 30% there is too much motion and I just get trashed around. They way I've fixed it is by adding a boundary of ~70% to both axis which gives a final axis % of 21 but with way more motion than just setting the axis to 21%. - these are not complaints just things I have noticed while spending hours refining my motion profile.

Sorry last question. How does increasing or decreasing values in the profile editor affect the game engine dof outputs. I noticed the values can be set to +-50. Is it a %increase in axis movement or something like gain that makes the the axis more sensitive to game input or something else?

Here you go. Getting pretty close now. Adding a dead zone of 5 to the rear motor only definitely made a sizable improvement. Uploading a video of the rig in motion to YouTube with current profile settings right now too.