Question Pneumatic G-Seat with retrofit lumbar support kit?

I have discovered phantastic DIY G-Belt approaches in this forum from @xxpelle @volker metzger and others and was ever since thinking about building a similar DIY G-Seat for myself.

It stayed a dream untill recently when I discovered full retrofit lumbar support kits for cars on Ebay.



Do you guys think these kits could be used as basis for a DIY G-Seat project?

Thanks for your reply! I fully agree that the requirements differ between the lumbar kit in a car and a pneumatic G-Seat system, however I thought industrially manufactured and connected air cushions could be a great basis for a DIY solution.

I think I will give it a try, shoudn't it be possible to connect the pump from the lumbar set to Simtool/Arduino (it works with 12V I guess) somehow, in order to achieve a similar results of other DIY pneumatic G-Seats?

I am a total novice here, so hopefully I am not on a impossible track here

here is the link: https://www.ebay.de/itm/185392733675 hope this helps. I am not completely sure how this works, but it should be a complete kit. Guess instead of the pump, servos and Arduino could be used for our purpose

Thanks for the link, very helpfull

Let me see if I can find more detailled infos. I'll share it here then

seems pretty difficult to find more detailled infos. What kind of informations would you need to evaluate the usability for our purpose?

If you manage to hook up the pump to a power supply and get it working such that you can inflate and deflate the cushion with the existing pump, it is relatively simple to have this controlled by an arduino.

The tricky bit would be to have some degree of analog control so that the pump can be controlled such that the cushion is only partly inflated when you want it to be. It depends a bit on how the product is currently designed, I would imagine that it is one button to inflate and another to deflate and if so you may have to look at programming the arduino to calculate the degree of surge by the time that the pump is switched on for.

As Noorbeast has mentioned, it may not be fast enough via the pump, though arguably you can get away with a bit of latency with a back surge effect.

This is nice to see all these parts in a single bundle
but I agree on the fact that the specs are not the same for simracing use.

I can see a safety valve? on the blue tube but there should be some pressure sensor in the 2 box with red, blue and yellow tubes: can you check that? This could help you to drive the pump accordingly to the game telemetry via Simtools.

But I have been struggling to set a good PID
https://www.xsimulator.net/community/threads/wip-racingmats-closed-circuit-gseat.14071

Thanks for both your responses. I will check how this could work. I do not know how fast the pump will work, but I can imagine that it might be slower than systems used for sim rig.

@GWiz if I understand the kit properly, there is one switch to select the tube (4-directions switch) and one switch for in- or deflation.

But as said, i still need to understand how it works. maybe I just hook it up to a 12V PSU and see what happens....

@RacingMat you might noticed that the two blue tubes need to be connected and they then go via the two controller boxes (not sure if the have sensors) to the pump.



How could I check that they have sensors, any idea??

okay, plugs on the blue tubes are connectors and not safety valves...

Can you pry open the box? and share a picture of the components?
Or count the electrical wires?

@RacingMat

I was able to open the lumbar pumps, here are the pictures whats in them:



- 6 Cables (pump with black connector, first 2 pictures) left to right: red, brown, black/yellow, brown/yellow, black/white, black/blue

- 5 Cables (pump with white connector, 3-4 pictures) left to right: red, brown, black/blue, white/yellow, blue/yellow

and thats the pneumatic (air) pump:



Cables red and black from pump, red into connector, black/yellow out, black into connector, brown out.

switch forward/backward (I guess air in, air out) has three cables: red, yellow/white and yellow/blue

4-Way switch /for each bladder I guess) 2 cables: black/white and brown/yellow

Does this help in any way (luckly home office day today, so stuff in reach) ;-)

besides the pump is big enuff. the duty cicle wil be far to low for a active G seat
just my two cents

what would be the possible solution for "the duty cicle wil be far to low for a active G seat"?

yep, good point: I haven't found the duty cycle in the specs...

Duty Cycle goes from Continuous Duty to Periodic Duty (in %)

any good?

I have been short of time to follow-up here, but if I correctly understand the comments made so far, you guys think that the pneumatic pump (KPME32) is not sufficient enough for a G-Seat operation.

If that's correct, which alternative pump (Servo?) would you recommend for that set?