Showroom 2DOF D.I.Y. Motion Simulator in Brazil

Hello everybody. It's my turn to do my 2DOF Motion Simulator project.
After reading and seeing many topics in this Forum, observing the challenges, facilities and difficulties, I showed the project to my cousin and we took courage to start.
In a very brief presentation, we are both Engineers, one Civil and the other from Telecommunication and we live in Brazil. In this way I will translate it into English, so I ask for understanding with some errors, but in the end I will also leave the description in Portuguese BR.
The initial Budget is to spend around $300 USD (R$1500.00) on everything needed to make the RIG Motion.
We intend to also put support for Pedals and Yoke/Wheel in this Rig.
As I wrote Yoke, it is clear that the initial idea was to make the Rig to use with a flight simulator (FS2020), but we will use it with car simulators too, of course.
At first, the project is to place a "chair" on the structure, but in parallel we are already adding support for the pedals and Yoke/Wheel and who knows a support for a small monitor in the last stage.
The problem with the low Budget is to get a stronger engine here in Brazil, so that's why I left the last step of the screen support for the end.. see how the engines behave with more weight.
The Rig will be compact (600x600mm) base if we count step 1, but still the idea is to have around +/- 20 degrees (40º) Pitch and Roll.
Today the last purchased material arrived, the Metalon 60mm x 60mm x 2mm steel that we are going to use to make the Rig and so we start the project.
Below is the full scale drawing:

Continuing... Below is the list of equipment purchased for the project:
As I said, there is a difficulty in finding engines in Brazil like those seen in several projects here on the forum, and it gets worse if we also raise the question of prices.
Below is the description of the motor purchased to be used in the project:

Supply Voltage: 24VDC
Rated Torque: 10Nm
Peak Torque: 48Nm
Rated Current: 5.0A
Peak Current :18.6A
Rotation: 51 RPM
Shaft Diameter: 10mm



The Power Supply is standard 24V - 30A:


The electronics are the same used in the vast majority of projects I've seen around here, but I added a DC-DC Step Down LM2596 voltage converter to connect a 12V fan, reducing to 6V to slow down and cool the Driver Motors. I will call this system Brain and talk more about it in detail in the next post:

1x Arduino UNO R3
2x Driver Motor BTS7690 IBT-2
1x Step Down LM2596 DC-DC Converter

I also bought a Mercedez Bens Bus Shifter Universal Joint:


4x Rod End M12


1 threaded rod of 1 meter M12


2x 10mm shaft flange


Metalon 6 meters measuring 60mm x 60mm x 2mm

Now I'm going to give details about the "Brain", electronics of our Rig Motion, but first I'll post the calculations made by SIMCALC.



As stated earlier the intention is to get 20 degrees to both sides for PICTH and ROLL. By calculations we have more than 18 degrees, but I think there is still room to reach 20 degrees. An example is to increase the length of the CTC from 2.35in (5.97cm) to 2.60in (6.6cm) we have already achieved the goal. We will return to this topic later on, once we have completed the welding of the structure.
Now talking about the "Brain" I'm going to use an old burnt PC Power Supply to put the Arduino board, 2x Driver Motor and the DC-DC Step Down converter inside. So we can use the Fan to cool the BTS4690.
I produced a part on the 3D printer to join the electronics inside the old PC Power Supply. The piece made appears "painted" green in the images and was printed with White PLA:





I gave the power supply housing a coat of black paint, originally it was gray.


And finally, I used the already known wiring diagram with 2.5mm parallel wires for connections between 24V power supply and motors with the 2 Driver Motor BTS7609.



And our "Brain" is ready.


I have an Arduino UNO R3 CLONE, so I had to install a driver to recognize the CH341 chip in Windows 11, but everything went smoothly. Firmware SMC3.ino v1.0 has already been installed without problems. In the next post I test with the SMC3 utils and engine. Here I will face the first challenge. I want to use Sensor Hall 49e instead of Potentiometer.

Moving on... I was able to make a design for the Hall 49e sensor replacing the Potentiometer.
Ok... I lost a few hours and some design to achieve a balance between the orbital distance of the 2 Neodymium magnets in relation to the Hall sensor.
The very close magnets meant greater amplitude, but limited the motor's operating angle. Ideally, it should have 180 degrees of motor shaft rotation, with +/- 90 degrees to each side. Later on you will see that I managed to get around 160 degrees .. then between +/- 80 degrees for each side.
Below I leave a sample of the final design of the parts for the Hall sensor.


With the hall sensor defined and replacing the Potentiometer, we started to test in the SMC3 Utils. I made a change in the firmware enabling POT_SCALING (#define ENABLE_POT_SCALING) but I practically only displaced the central axis by "-8" (Feedback2 = analogRead(FeedbackPin2)*1 -8.
Regarding the SMC3 Utils, I didn't make fine adjustments to the PIDs and just left the motors at half load, although I tested them with full load, but the initial idea was to configure the axis displacement extremes.
For this I configured the Clip Input because the Hall Sensor works with a maximum of 180 degrees (exceeding 180 degrees inverts the reading).
Below is a short video showing the test in SMC3 utils.


If you have a suggestion to further improve the angle from 160 to 180 degrees or other suggestions by viewing the behavior of the SMC3 in the video, I am grateful.
I haven't installed another app like SIMTOOLs yet. I'll check to see if I'm eligible for a builder's license and then make new settings and post at a later time.
This week I'm going to try to start welding the structure, mainly to have the engines in their final position and thus be able to test with maximum load.

Thanks for the answer! I'm on my way then. This week I must proceed with the welding of the metallic structure. A question... How do you manage to keep up with all the topics?

How are you my friend. Have you finished the project? And the old question: did the engines work? Were they strong enough?

Ok. Thanks!