36 Hour 2DOF Joyrider + Oculus (In Progress)

UPDATE: Check my post below. Tl;dr, didn't finish it, won prizes anyways, still going to finish it (this weekend?)

This weekend, myself and four others are working on a joyrider sim. First of, big thanks to @bsft and @eaorobbie for their advice and help.

We're assembling this as part of a hackathon at our university here, running for 36 hours.

We had to make significant sacrifices in the name of saving time, which led us to purchase
https://www.sparkfun.com/products/10182 - Arduino Moto Shield
http://www.robotmarketplace.com/products/AME-218-1001.html - Modded wiper motor x2 (sorry @bsft, this was the only thing we could find in time)
JRKv12

Unfortunately the motors haven't arrived yet. We still have 20 hours to go, however.

So far, we've got some of the frame assembled and a game using the Oculus (3 people working on the game, 2 people on the sim).




We're going to run our custom game as well as Elite: Dangerous. Looking forward to how this turns out!
This is only version one, if it works we might have enough funds to make a second, improved version.

Cheers

Good luck fella's

Last I heard they had an issue with modifying the wiper, removing earth.
I do hope the info I shot to his phone helped them through it.
Would love an update too @noorbeast

I don't know all of that history but building a sim for the first time in 36hours could only be done successfully if you have already build one. If you do it the first time you will fail for sure IMO. NTL I hope the guys will achieve success

Im going to have to Agree with Pit here, there's FAR too many Little thing's you need to learn First hand and or be Explicitly explained.

I worked out if I had the materials in front on me for a seat mover, that includes JRKS, and big motors, with the experience, yes I could bash one together in 36 hours.
I would allow extra time to build a PC and set at least one game in Simtools.

Hey guys, so here's the update.

Predictably, we didn't finish the sim. BUT, here's how far we got. (sorry for huge photo)


Good news: it didn't matter that we didn't finish. We still won best hardware hack, and took home 5 leap motion controllers as well as 5 $25 in prizes of our choice.

More good news: We got a space to finish working on this on campus.

We ended up with 2x Dodge 1995 B3500 wiper motors because the modded ones we ordered didn't show up in time (still haven't, actually despite 2 day air). One of our PSU's was shipped DOA, and we fried the other one because we didn't ground the PSU first. Not a huge deal, $20 loss. Picked up another PSU at Walmart at 3am.

2 of us worked on the flight simulator while 3 others worked on a game in Unity. This ended up being really good, because it meant we had a finished product we could demo. The game was a "paper airplane simulator", and the idea was that you'd get to feel like a paper airplane in virtual reality, flying around. We're hoping to make a custom cockpit and tron game (where you'd be laying forward on this), because that would just be awesome.

Despite getting around most of our motor issues, we didn't end up getting the motors to work at all. We're going to do that this weekend, being a bit more careful and having the right parts. Since we've still only got one JRK controller, we're going for 1DOF until the other arrives. This being our first time, 1DOF entails enough issues and we are fairly confident that we can mod it to 2DOF with enough foresight in our design. We modified the bearing mount due to a lack of bolts and the fact that home depot was closed, though I think this led to the outer parts bending in rather dangerously.

We're 90% sure that funding is going to come in for this project. We're hoping to build a 2nd version with better motors and conduit piping to sell to our university lump-sum (offload all the insurance/licensing issues to them, essentially). That part is still very much in the air though.

So, any ideas for incorporating a leap motion sensor with a simulator? https://www.leapmotion.com/

As far as I'm concerned, this hackathon was a pretty big success.

I contacted them. They don't provide their software on their website, and it doesn't sound like they intend to give away for free. So, I'll do that if I can, but it seems like a fairly large maybe.

I e-mailed them, sounds like they are actually incorporating their software into the Oculus lib itself! That's really good news for everyone.

I'm still unsure about how good leap motion is for interfaces. It looks cool. I'm guessing that it will feel strange though, due to the lack of physical feedback. Cool ideas though!

I've actually seen somebody do a submarine type thing with the leap motion and an oculus, so it's funny that you mention it.

I'm thinking the leap motion might be nice for just being able to see your hands in general - I don't think they necessarily have to actually do anything in particular. I like the idea for elite dangerous, though they would need to implement that on their end.

Well done guys @narthur157 ya gave it a good go and learnt heaps, keep at it and it will bear fruit.

We finally got the sim working with 1DOF as a temporary setup. Feels good in LFS with the Oculus on, though we didn't have positional tracking setup which made you a bit sick. We're starting on 2DOF now and tweaking our 1DOF design to be less of a hack. We ended up moving the chair up because it's way too low here. Also, you can tell how much of a death trap this appears to be. It's safer than you'd think, but not necessarily by too much.

Pulley design is definitely not ideal. We're looking into either a better pulley design or gears for the pitch axis.