Junkyard 6DOfG

So it begins……

Like many others here i have been fascinated by flight, racing and things that go fast and far. By extension the machines that simulate these things are also highly intoxicating and luckily in this day and age much more accessible.

Then last year i knocked together my first rig to house a G29 racing wheel bundle for my son. For your consideration i present the MKI-



Granted this was a rushed and rudimentary project. The main goal was to make an additional chair for the XBOX room and test my sons interest level.

In this the MKI succeeded brilliantly and now it is time to kick things up a great big notch….

The idea is to build a 6DOF Hexapod Rig. The broad constraints are-
1. Used or recycled materials where ever possible.
2. Reliability and safety (fire, mechanical and electrical in particular)
3. Lowest cost possible. Not to be cheap (and yeah to be cheap) but to build on the works of @silentchill (how you built your rig for 2K is staggering) and @peacemaker (use of easy to source off the shelf components).
4. Locally sourced where ever possible.
5. be somewhat moveable - my son IS winning every science fair between now and graduation or so help me.
6. The project has to look fast standing still

Note- I reserve the right to abandon the above constraints and throw money at the project when ever i think my wife wont find out.

On the plus side-
As far as fabrication is concerned i have access multiple 3d printers, a TIG welder, more power tools than you can shake a stick at, vacuum bagging equipment and a decent amount of experience in fabrication.

Holding me back-
Whilst I have built a couple of 3d printers, rewired multiple cars, boats and motorcycles electronics are a mystery. coding is witchcraft.

And that is it.

Thank you for your future inputs and help.

Now I am off to the local electric motor repair shop to get schooled on why what i propose can’t be done while at the same time costing a fortune.

So those last 3 years just flew by and I am only now getting back to the build…

parts are arriving already

And here is base - yes it is wood- the units on the arms are movable to allow me to experiment with the position of the lower attachment points before to fine tune before the final build.

Today fedex saw fit to deliver 6DOF/2

So DO NOT BUY the motors and controllers pictured above. They are not the right ones and are going back.

Correct. Best is to get the servo kits with white AASD-15A drives...

I'll have to tally up the final cost on my 6 DOF. I went the DC route as I still think it's cheaper, at least in the US. I've seen several people list the AC servos for cheap, but most of those people seem to be in Europe or something. My DC setup is based on motor pairs as my controllers are all dual channel (Sabertooths). So each pair is something like $30 per motor, $150 per controller (Sabertooth + Kangaroo), and ~$80 for a power supply. So 1x two motor "unit" is ~$300, or $150 per motor (though you can't really build a "single" for half the cost). I think I remember seeing some of the AC servo combos on places like AliExpress or something, but shipping was the killer on cost. All of that directly interfaces with the computer as well, so no need for a separate motion controller inbetween (like a Thanos).

Granted, the AC setup is going to be a fair deal more powerful and probably cleaner to wire up with built in encoders and stuff like that, but I also wanted to build a single partial unit first to see how everything was going to work before I jumped in and committed to everything else. I started off just buying a single lead screw assembly, some limit switches, an encoder and 3d printed some plates to screw it all to a piece of wood to test with to make sure the control system was going to work. When that worked out I took the leap and started putting together the list of metal stuff to make it all more permanent.

I did reuse some parts from my original 2 DOF rig, and a lot of the stuff I got as birthday/Christmas presents over a few years, but I should have a near full BOM with prices somewhere. I want to say the all-in cost for me was probably somewhere in the $2-2.5k range, but I know at the end I was also just kind of buying whatever I needed to finish things. I kind of broke it down into three main categories: metal/structure, actuator parts, and power/control system.