Adding 2DOF (Seat Shaker) to Aluminum Rig

First duct fresh off the printer, quality isn’t great. I think the slicer had a tough time with the model, I need to add another piece of software to the chain to check .stl files for errors before printing. One side actually had a layer shift half way through the print.

It works great, I am amazed at how much the air is directed with the little fin insert. The plan being that after installation I can tweak the insert to get the air exactly where I want it. Maybe even an adjustable version just like a car vent.

I need to tweak the model a bit to add a few more bolt brackets but otherwise I think it’s good to go.

M printer ran for 3 days straight, but I got both sides printed out and installed. Mounting the fans was easy enough, I just bolted them to the extrusion. I couldn't find anything but silver flex duct so that's what I went with, if it bothers me enough I might change it later.








the amount of air these things put out is incredible, unfortunately it all blows directly at my head. I think that would be great for vr, but with monitors I would bet it will bother my eyes very quickly. I actually tested just the fans in the mounted location and It worked pretty well to get a full body blast of air, if I would have tried that before hand I probably would of scrapped the whole vent idea. the nice thing about the removable inserts is I can just tweak it a bit to re-direct the air more at my chest. but who knows, I have to try it out first.

that leads me to my problem. I haven't been able to get game dash working yet, it seems that no matter what I do I cannot get it to talk to my arduino. I pulled up iracing and I can get data being sent to the game dash and I can see values changing. I have pulled up the arduino serial monitor and I can manually send S100 and the fans react, but nothing when using game dash. its got me stumped.

Here are my settings


Edit
got it working, had to reinstall all the simtools software. all settings were correct though.

Just to demonstrate why I wanted to change the fans pwm rate to 20khz.

Now that I have my vents mounted I ran into an issue. I cant turn on my left tablet. I figured I could sneak a small allen wrench in there to turn it on, but with the mounting screw right there It was a no go.



This is the power button on the right dash tablet. I can easily reach underneath and turn it on.




The left dash tablet power button is unreachable now that I have the vents mounted on top. I had a few ideas, but this is what I came up with.




I printed out my little button plunger, only took 3 minutes and then I pulled the left duct off and drilled an 1/8 hole right above the power button. I had to hold the assembly together while I slid the vent in place, but it turned out pretty well. I can easily get a finger into the the vent and toggle the power button.



There are a few other things I have done recently

Keyboard and stylus mounting. I prefer to pull the keyboard out, use it in my lap and then set it aside when I'm racing. I will probably do a redesign where the keyboard keys face in rather then out because It feels a little awkward to rotate the keyboard 180 degrees every time I put it away. I use the stylus for setting stuff up on the tablets, with the aluminum plate surround its hard to get your fingers to the edges of the screen. during racing fingers work just fine though.



I re-mounted my shifter to get it another 1.5" further away from the seat. I had been playing with the SMC3 software and with my seat moving now it was clear that I was going to have an issue with the shifter hitting.




I utilized the t-slots on the shifter and the existing mounting hole on the emergency brake to mount the e-brake right on the shifter. I wanted to keep the e-brake low enough that it didn't interfere with the tablet but still have a comfortable feel. I still have just enough room to put the shifter into reverse without hitting the ebrake.




I 3d printed a bracket to give the ebrake a little more rigidity.



the e-brake is only mounted with one bolt to the shifter and two bolts to the 3d printed bracket. I added a second bolt in the t-slot of the shifter so that any pressure is spread out onto the shifter rather then the 3d printed bracket. the 3d printed bracket is keeping the brake from rotating backwards from the momentum of the handle returning. I ran for a while without the bracket and after a few laps the ebrake would start to swing forward and slowly loosen itself.




A note on the fanatec E-brake, Its ok but not great. I know they have updated the design to remove plastic components, but I have the old design and it was pretty sloppy loose right from the get go. I had to pull it apart and put some shims inside to get everything snug. even so its not very rigid and the handle will flex a ton from side to side. but it is analog and has a decent enough feel for the little amount that I use it. If I were going to be doing only rally racing I would look into building my own hydraulic brake.

I spent a lot of time this weekend organizing all of the "stuff" that I have accumulated over the last year or two. I started with 3 overflowing totes and slowly organized everything into two neat totes. One for my racing simulator and one for linear actuators. It was tough to get rid a lot of that stuff, but with the simulator taking up more and more space I need to only keep what is absolutely needed.

Quick update, I spent the better part of the day (Snow day today!) working on chair motion. Long story short I finally got the XPID sketch to work with my setup (thanks @vthinsel ), in the end it was some bad eeprom values and after a lot of back and forth I figured it out. The next step is to get motion output tuned inside simtools and that's where I'm stuck. Every time I launch iRacing simtools game engine crashes and I get no output. so far I have tried just about everything short of a full reinstall of windows, I'm hoping I can figure it out because I just did a reinstall and I really don't want to go through all that again. If I have to do a full install I will probably go with windows 10 over windows 7.

On the bright side I also installed my oculus rift and WOW that is a ton of fun. I have used the rift in the past, but I forgot how much better it is then monitors. Now that I have wind working and soon motion It is just amazing. I plan on finishing everything as is, but based on how the future of VR turns out I may reconfigure the rig just for VR. for now it will be kind of dual purpose though.

The sensor is installed in the corner of the front monitor and points directly at my head, so far no issues with tracking. I found a handful of parts that worked out pretty good, saved me the effort of designing my own mount.






This has me pretty excited about the Vive Pro, hopefully more details come out soon.

I already posted on the simtools thread, but if you want to take a look I have all the details there.

https://www.xsimulator.net/communit...on-software-simtools.4872/page-26#post-149438

Motion is the last piece of the puzzle so I’m determined to get it working.

Thanks for any help

Agreed, that is why I pointed you to my post in the sim tools thread. I wasn’t asking for help here, just giving an update of where I am. Sorry if I confused you.

I have been putting in some late hours trying to get the last finishing touches on the Simulator. I ended up doing a full windows 10 re-install and over the last few days I have slowly re-installed all of my software. I'm Happy to report that everything is playing together nicely and I have motion data coming out of the game. I finally got around to installing the last 4 transducers and my second sound card. That ended up being a bit of a hassle as I was having problems getting the sound card software to recognize two identical cards. In the end it ended up being a rookie mistake as I had my amp plugged into the wrong ports. In the end I really didn't even need two cards as I use either the Rift or my Headphones for audio so the on-board audio could have served as one of my simvibe outputs.

Here is the inside of the PC, took quite the effort to get it out from under my control box and then back in there. notice the little relay inside, that is how I turn the PC on and off from my switch panel.



And the transducers under the seat






Transducer on the Shifter



and under the pedals



As soon as I got motion setup I had to get the harness setup. My seat doesn't have a slot for the sub strap, someday I will replace the seat so for now I just have them running over the front of the seat. I may even rig up the shoulder straps to tension or add some springs in the future.



and here is an early test of the motion system with the oculus rift. I still need to do a lot on the tuning portion, but it was still a lot of fun.

Quick question, looking or some verification of the way each DOF works with a 2dof setup. This is how I have it in my head, but I wanted to see if I am backwards here.

Pitch - Car pitches forward, seat pitches forward

Roll - Car rolls right, seat rolls right

Surge - Car Accelerates, Seat pitches back

Sway - Car turns left, seat rolls right

Heave- Car heaves up, seat pitches backward.

Almost Done! I put the rig up on stilts and pulled the lower rack out to setup the mounting locations for the computer, control box and amp.






I added 3" to the rig and increased the control box size so I had to move all of the cross bars. I have some end caps with holes drilled in them that the feet on each box nest in to keep everything from sliding around.


Ready to go back into the rig.



I also picked up some cheap belt pads for comfort.



and I finally installed the grab bar to make it easier to crawl in and out. I ended up having to drill a handful of holes in the stainless steel flanges, my little drill press paid for itself here.



And this is where it stands right now, I have everything hooked up and working but cable management is non existent.



Here is where I stand

Things to do
New Seat, On Hold
Finish wiring motors and tuning motion, Wired but still need to tune
Add wind generator fans and program, Done
rebuild PC with fresh copy of windows (I keep getting errors from all the junk that was on the pc when it was re-purposed), Done 2X
Add a lock-out for motion so when I don't want it on the seat doesn't move. In the works
Add my 8 Transducers back to the rig (4 corners, 2 under seat, 1 under pedals, 1 Wheel or shifter), Done
Mount my shifter and Emergency Brake, Done
Main power switch/Disconnect, In the Works
Move all electrical boxes into the frame and clean up wiring, Moved but still need cable management
Find a way to mount monitors so they don't vibrate as much (V8 stock car really gets them humming at idle), I am planning on removing the side monitors after everything is setup. I will leave the cords so they are easy to re-attach.
Program Tablets for typical controls and dashboard display, Done
Permanent mount a keyboard and mouse, Done, might move to a better location yet.
Grab bar to to assist entry and exit of the rig, Done

New Items
Add stops (Replace 3d printed parts) to prevent over-travel of the motors
Add more feet, this thing is heavy and I don't want it to destroy my carpet.
better mounts and locations for the headphones and rift.
Place for my spare wheel and shifter nob
Update 3d model to match actual rig

I had the basement all cleaned up and organized but of course that couldn't last. I decided to pull the lower rack back out to make installing more feet and wiring easier. The good news is I made my last purchase for the simulator and I "should" be done spending money for a while.





First order of business was adding more feet. I originally chose hockey pucks for the feet so I was stuck with that. I picked up a box of 50 hockey pucks on ebay and set out to mount them to the frame.


The drill press made short work of drilling holes in 48 hockey pucks.



And the mounted hockey pucks



I use furniture sliders underneath each foot to make the whole rig slide easier on the carpet. In order to get the sliders to stay on the hockey pucks I printed up some brackets.



I had to make up 28 total, so it took about 2 days of non stop printing.



I might have gone a little overboard.

A couple of other items off the list, I added some new runaway bumpers. the new ones have a bolt running through them so they should be plenty strong enough, but hopefully I wont have to test them. I also added a fan to each gear motor, the fans are 120 volts and each one plugs into an auxiliary on the control box.



Here are the 3d printed brackets I made to mount the fans, hopefully the motors don't get hot enough to deform the printed parts.


I printed up a bracket that my spare fanatec shifter knob can thread onto and mounted it and my spare motor QD to the frame behind the main monitor.




Last but not least I finished cable management for the lower rack. One step closer to the end.

Just a little

Nice clean build, I like it

Thanks, Ya I get carried away some times.

A few more items off the list, I printed up my main disconnect switch box and got that wired and mounted.



I have a single cable coming into the box and two cables going out, it just ended up this way because of what I had in my bin. The single cable in is rated at 15 amps and the two going out are rated at 10 amps each so I should be covered. I will get out my current meter and see what kind of amps the whole rig draws, but I have already tested everything and I didnt trip my circuit breaker so I am happy.


I also cleaned up the wiring on my potentiometers and added some 3d printed caps.



Pots installed. Because of the way the pots are mounted one pot needs to be inverted. I did that by switching the v+ and G wires on one of the pots. I made sure to mark them so I don't get them mixed up.



I got the lower rack back under the rig, I do not want go through that process a third time.



I didn't have time to get to final wiring, but it shouldn't take long. Hopefully my next update will be a wired an running simulator.

Another Update

I added some foam weather strip to the lid on the control box to eliminate any vibrations. I didn't plan it but the color matches nicely.


I can't swing open the control box lid so I replace the hing pins with allen wrenches so I can lift the entire lid off for service.



I also installed my lockout system, its two toggle clamps that nest into a hole on the side of my seat frame. the mounting blocks are 3d printed, but they seem to be holding up well enough





I installed some hooks for my main power cord so everything is neat and tidy.



Lastly I wired up the motors using some XT90 connectors that I had laying around. Fan Motors are using Bullet Connectors and the pots are using 1/4' QD connectors.



I still have a few small things left to do, but for the most part I am done. I have everything wired and tested and I am happy to say that I only had 1 hiccup during reassembly. For some reason one of my pots was acting up and I had to do a little disassembly for diagnostics, but in the end everything was wired correctly and it is all working. I need to clean up my work area before I get pictures of the finished rig, but I should have them in the next day or so.

Things to Do yet
Tune Tune Tune - Vibe and Motion
Install a Fan on my Monster Moto Plus - I don't think I need it, but I have all the stuff so why not.
Oculus rift and Headphones mount
Relocate keyboard

I was having some problems with my fanatec rims losing connection during a race so I pulled some stuff apart to check it out. I am using an industrial grade slip ring from senring.com, so I wasn't too happy that it was already failing after very little use. to make matters worse the location of the slip ring makes it nearly impossible to get at.

Notice the little tab on the right side of the slip ring, I had that screwed down tight and according to the manufacture that is a big no-no. the tab is supposed to be pinned, but floating so that any misalignment in the two halves isn't transferred into the slip ring. I ended up pulling out the bolt, installing a longer one and wrapping the bolt in some rubber bands to absorb any slop that the tab has. It turned out pretty good, but I dropped the bolt once and had to get one of my kids with little fingers to retrieve it for me. (its stainless steel so no magnet tricks)





There are 4 screws that hold the collar onto my steering shaft and for whatever reason those were also loose. I think what was happening was the usb cable was actually tightening and forcing the slip ring to spin putting all of the stress on the usb cable. I removed each of the screws and applied some loc-tite and got everything nice and tight. Everything is working again and no matter how fast I spin the wheel I don't lose connection anymore. I am guessing I have damage my usb cable to some degree, but I wont investigate that unless I have too. I had to remove the middle tablet and the right side air vent to even be able to get access.

I also finished up my brackets for the rift and headphones. The rift bracket is designed to hold the rift so that dust doesn't settle on the lens and the bracket is also open so the sensor doesn't think someone is wearing it. It is a remix of a mount on thingiverse, the original is on the left.





My headphone mount is a simple redesign to make attaching to the 15x30 extrusion easier.



Lastly I had debated buying a new seat, but I put that on the back burner. I didn't like the fit of the crotch strap going over the front of the seat so I decided to put in a 5th/6th point slot and grommet.

I didn't have any reference to the size it should be so I just guessed and came up with 1.5 x 3 inside.


A sharp exacto knife and kitchen knife made short work of the seat cover and foam.






I 3d printed the grommet and ran some 4-40 screws the full length to add strength to the flange. Now that I am done it is way overkill, but I have no fear of it ever breaking.




Lastly I had to adjust my crotch strap mounting location to take up the extra slack, Its a pain to adjust, but I don't want the metal adjusters digging into my legs. I may come up with a better system in the future, but for right now it works pretty good. like this.




I still need to tune, but I decided to skip the fan on my monstermoto. My printer is tied up for the next couple days and I wan't to call this project done so I can move back to my linear actuator.

I am going to call this rig done. I will need to spend some time tuning and tweaking, but everything works. Pictures are a little tough because of the lighting in the basement and because I don't have a lot of space but here it is in all of its glory.