Thomson engineering s2 venture simulator

G'day all , I've just got my hands on a commercial hydraulic motion simulator . Back in the early 2000's these things were in shopping centres and I'm looking at upgrading it with new software as a personal sim. Its running hydraulics and was hoping i may get some help .
Thanx in advance.

You are correct in that the computer hardware is proprietary for the controler although my plan was to upgrade all the computer side including the driver and thought Simtools would be part of that solution. As far as the mechanical hardware goes , its all off the shelf items.

Dunno , thats why I'm here.

To find out what out what options I have if any . The sim Only Cost me A$1000 and has A$10,000 worth of hydraulic gear in it so i'm not gunna loose out either way but i'm keen on making this work.

wow that looks so cool! I'd love to know more about it, did you find out it's name and serial number?

There is a servo controller called R2040 from Rutex that takes step&direction signals and converts them to +/-10V velocity commands. I used them many years ago to retro-fit an old machine with analogue servo drives. Something like this can also be used to drive hydraulic proportinal valves with a Thanos controller. If you search the internet you probably find something similar based on Arduino boards that is cheaper.

I have a bad habit of missing obvious details. the name of the thread is what I needed to do a quick look up. It's the S2 venture and it's just as rad I thought it would be. I wish mine had those doors!





It comes in red too!

Thanx for the advice, fortunately the existing driver hardware is still working and a mate who is a programer is looking into the software for the source code. The valves on the hydraulics are 24v so we will need 0-24v to operate the proportional valves. If we can get the source code then we might be able to get it to work with sim tools. Thats how i understand it anyway. we got the laser disc working today and powered up the computer and found the computer wasnt booting off the HDD. It was just making a click noise every 5 seconds so hopefuly once thats fixed we can move on to the next issue if any. we are gunna get the thing running with the software and hardware it was designed for first to get a better understanding of what will need to be changed to upgrade and repurpose the ride into a functioning 4 DOF sim.

heres some pics of the data plates on the valves and the motor.

Ok, I can see an oil tank, the hydraulic pump, a pressure accumulator and three proportional valves. I'd check the oil and the filters first and then disconnect all the electronics. Then power the pump and see if you get some pressure. Connect a lab power supply to the solenoids one by one. If you raise the voltage from 0 to 24V you should see the cylinders moving. If the hydraulics work you can try to get the electronics running.

I've found some info about the valves. Theese are spring centered open loop (no feedback) types. This means you don't get any information about the actual position of the plunger. It is roughly proportional to the voltage apllied but don't expect much bandwidth. You can only apply slow voltage changes otherwise the valve will overshot and cause oscillations.

Can you see some sort of position sensor at the cylinders? There should be a glass scale or string-pulley-encoder unit for each cylinder to provide position feedback to the software.

All mechanical systems are working according to the previous owner. There are no oil leaks from the wiper seals or connections. Mechanicly its in great condition. Its got linear encoders on each cylinder. I cant power it up at the moment as i dont have 3 Phase power . This will be sorted as of tomorrow , I'm picking up a phase converter i got cheap.