Showroom 12v Winch Motor Driving Simpit

you've ordered them, fine ! We'lll have the same

if you want to test safely the limits in intensity, you just have to plan to insert a fuse between the driver board and the motor ;-)
and later, if a heavy friend goes in your playseat, you won't blow your electronic !

I am the heavy friend!

I will absolutely put the fuses inline. I have already purchased the fuse holders as part of my wiring plan.

Hi Historiker,

I've posted the Arduino code that suits to this 1 pin PWM and 1 pin DIR driver board here :
post44009.html#p44009

Thanks RacingMat! Hopefully by the time I get home my controllers will be waiting. I think that with about a day of work in the shop I could actually have the motors moving.

Finally, I am home! Hawaii was great for a day or two but all I could think of was completing my build. Two weeks was far too long.

My motor drivers arrived while I was gone, I picked up the rest of the wiring that I needed today (needed two pots).

Thanks to RacingMat I should be up and running pretty quick.


Aaron, you mention running one motor off both sides of this driver, how would I wire that?


More to come!

Some progress:









I need to finish the wiring harness and mount the potentiometers, then some testing to see if everything works.

Looks good ! +1
This width will give you the needed stability.
Ujoint looks solid !!

Eager too see this coming to life soon )

Thanks Mat, The over large base is so I can upgrade in the future to a 3DoF motion platform. I wanted to upgrade slowly, one step at a time

yeah....looking good.....

Getting sleepy, must stop working on it

The wiring harness is connected; looks like a snarled mess but I wanted to test things out before I loomed and routed the wires and created a housing for the electronics.

Just need to get RacingMat's ardiuno sketch loaded and hopefully I will test the motors tomorrow (after disconnecting them from the seat just to be safe).

I have Race07 loaded and working with Simtools 3.1 hope I can sleep tonight

Hey that's looking really good and appears as though you aren't far off sim motion?

Sleep... just a few more minutes... Oh it's morning again... you'll just have to have a sleep at work! Happy sim dreams

Just one thing to pick on ya connecting rods angle is very shallow I tend to work with a min of about 60 deg, the more vertical this rod is the hard your motors will have to work, roll is the motion that will affect them the most.
Basic principals of leverage, if you have to push vertically you are supporting 100% of the load and at 45 deg you are only supporting approx. 50% of the load so this angle can be a critical feature of have a sim move efficiently and fast.



See how you go. Another did you set the pivot position correctly, ie mount everything on the sim , including you and monitors and accessories, then place a pipe under the base move it back and forth with you on it to find the balance point for your sim. Apart from that all looks good mate.

RuFus, I own my own cabinet shop so I get to set my own hours

Rob, excellent advice, thanks. I had not known about the proper angle on the supporting rods. I had kind of done an eyeball measurement from looking at other peoples setups. I can reverse the motor mounts and extend the pipes to allow a greater angle.

Yes, I did balance the rig before mounting on the base. The yellow paint dob you see on the side is actually the CG with everything mounted (including me). I am also working up a method to adjust the pivot mount for other, lighter, drivers as well as future additions to the platform.

Hmmm...so far not so good.

Connected as per RacingMat's instructions on his thread. Start up the system connect power, verify that the Arduino is functioning correctly, etc. I double double double (triple?) checked all connections.

Both motors disconnected from the seat, they spin at full speed in one direction until the arduino locks up and needs to be reset. The pots connected to the motors are functioning correctly. I checked them and the wiring harness using a sweep sketch with an R/C servo. The pots move the R/C servo in both directions with no stutter/shutter.

After a couple of tries the driver controller burns out resulting in this:



Odd thing is that it couldnt be drawing many amps, there is no load. 3A max I would guess. There are 15amp fuses in line with the motors as well.

That's too bad ! :cry:
I've just made some short tests with my boards, i'll do longer runs (with a bit of fear !)

I'm lost among your tests...
did they work well with my code and the boards for a while or never ?

Hi Mat,

I tried your setup (arduino and wiring) with both boards. I must have done something wrong as both boards are fried. Both let out smoke and no longer function.

What voltage did you use with your boards? The first run on mine was with 24v. After destroying the first board I tested with only 12v and the result was the same.


Again, the motors were without load. Testing the motors connected directly to the batteries results in 3amp no load and 14.5 amp load at failure.

It could be that both boards were just poor quality. This has happened before with Chinese eBay electronics. A 4-channel amp board that I purchased needed to have half the components re-soldered before it would work.

I really cannot think of how I could have hooked them up in-correctly.

Not blaming you at all, you have been a great help. I am sure the arduino settings are good. I am very suspicious of the cheap boards though.

Yes, i've tested the chinese board for some short tests before releasing the code !
But I'll do longer tests.

With Pololu 755, the code and the wiring are OK also !

These bridges may appear sadly too cheap ...

Do you think my motors might be the culprit? Not sure how to test for that other than doing and amp draw test which I have already done.

Here is a drawing of how I wired them. I did this both two motors on one card and with one motor per card. First run was with one motor per card, that is how I lost the first card, lol. I should have stopped. I then reduced voltage to 12v and hooked both into one card. Even more smoke and a larger pop.

Mat, I am going to order the Pololu 755 motor drivers today. Hopefully I will not screw those up. I must be doing something wrong if I destroyed 4 our of 4 motor circuits on the chinese drivers. I am worried that I will do the same with these as well.

Can you have a look at the picture that I posted above and verify that this is how you connected your boards?

Another question about the Pololu 755, the specifications seem to indicate that you do not connect +5v and ground to the driver board at all but rather it uses the 24v input instead?

In a typical configuration, only PWM and DIR are required.
The V+ pin on the logic side of the board gives you access to monitor the motor’s power supply (it should not be used for high current).

Thanks again for your help.

Hey guys just a quick note on this pololu driver.
As stated on site

Source:http://www.pololu.com/catalog/product/755

This driver needs a filtered voltage to run properly on 24v.

These have bigger balls, I would recommend them as I have thrashed the Jrks for years and these have bigger drivers on them. Actual 12amp cont with 30amp peaks, Heat sink them properly run 20-30amps all day, plus can be used as a dual driver or can have motor outputs combined to drive 24amps with 60 amp peaks.

All info on link its built specially for the ard, mmm maybe the code could be changed so it can be mounted as designed.
http://www.x-simulator.de/forum/posting.php?mode=edit&f=22&p=44389

Sorry my two cents.
To answer an old question I was going to test with my sparkfun monster motor driver as its a test unit, already setup.
After I had tested xpid and Prilads code for them on another site , to success. But not as nice as me jrks, but you want 24v so its either simaxe now, or ard, the untested Roo which one I have funds to play with again, and buy a sabertooth and test it, I can not 100% say it will work, But looks very promising to drive 24v at 60amps with 100amp peaks constant 1440W power hopefully to match 240v power.