Building a 4DOF from the SK3 kit provided by Simukit

thanks @noorbeast , I will dial the motion way down to see if it will get better. The VR was such a terrifying experience, a lot worse than the superman roller coaster at 6 flags that I've gone to!

Hi StarGazer ! Welcome to the real world !
I was answering you in private, but this can come handy for someone else :

For my understanding and my (or my relatives) experience, if you are subject to motion sickness on a moving plateform and not on a chair, it is because of the movement, induced by the plateform, seen in the headset, but not making sense on your brain.
As an example :
When you brake, the plateform move your head toward your wheel, you see it in the headset, but your brain wants it to be a movement of your neck. The damaging (sickening ) part is the roll. On a car, you will see your head drifting to the left and right, even if your hands still tell your brain that your wheel is right in front of you.

So you need "motion cancellation".

The basic idea is to attach one of your controller to your seat, near your head, visible from the camera / lighthouses, and tell the VR API to remove the movement of the controller from the computed movement of your head.
Hence, when braking, as both your headset and your controller will move the same distance, the VR api will consider you have not moved. (Which is true, in a seat-centric referential).

Here is the basic configuration summary :
You will want to use steamVR and not the OculusVR api for this to work. Your rift is fully capable and recognised by the SteamVR API, so this part is easy.
To check everything is running fine, you can start the steamVR tool, you should see yourself somewhere. (In a desert, by night I think).

Close it.
Install https://github.com/matzman666/OpenVR-InputEmulator this. The repo hasn't been updated in two years, but it should run ok.
Once installed, start steamVR, then the plugin, and go to the motion compensation settings.

Select "Use reference tracker", and pick the one you have binded near your head.

Warning : moving the controller is trippy, to say the least... ... But it is a good way to be sure it works !

Start your favorite game, with motion on, you should be just fine

Ok, so I ran the roller coaster game again with Game Manager/Motion Profile tuned down to 40% from 100%, and at the same time always look straight ahead to the immediate track in front of me. Then, I was able to complete a run. It was still a fearful experience but I didn't get the intense nausea feeling anymore. Interestingly, my kids and their friends tried the game over the weekend and they had no issue as all. They even demanded to have the motion turned back to 100%.

About the Oculus Rift S, when I used it on flight simulation P3D, it often gives me blurry reading of all the instrument. I often have to get closer to the panel to be able to read. Sometime moving the headset back and forth around the head also helped to make the image more clear. I thought that this is a fairly big problem for those of us who fly and cannot read the instruments. Is this blurry problem uniquely to me or others also have it? Also if you have used other VR like Valve Index and Vive Pro, do you have the same instrument reading problem???

Another thing which is not working well on my setup is the buttkicker. I have a buttkicker gamer 2 amp and a buttkicker mini concert installed. I found that it would work for about 20min and then cut off for long period of time before it would work again for another 20min. I thought that the problem was in the amp so I installed a computer fan to help cool it down. The problem still persist after the modification. Now I think that the buttkicker mini is actually the one at fault because it felt really warm when it cut out. Does anybody have similar problem? BTW, I watched this video and bought the $10 amp there. As far as I can tell it works really well. I wish I have bought that instead of the Buttkicker gamer 2 which costed me 10 times as much.

Before I had the Game Vibe working, I was driving the amp from the speaker output. Then I found the cut out problem. Now I am using Game Vibe and the cut out problem still happened. I also tried to turn the amp output down but the problem still persists.

I normally run it at 1/4 of the max volume (just to feel a light rumble on the chair) and it still cut out after every 20min. When I used the $10 amp, that one has a max of 100watt, the buttkicker mini has a max of 250watt so it suppose to handle the signal from the amp well. Especially when the amp volume was not even turned half way. Could it be that I have a defective transducer?

I bought it a little over a year ago so it probably out of warranty. I messaged the seller any way to see what he would said. Let wait and see.

I contacted the seller and the company but I couldn't get an exchange nor refund. I was able to make it somewhat working by turning the amp volume way down. Just barely above zero and I could feel a bit of rumbling for the entire of the play.

Since I found that it was hard to read the flight instrument and text with the Rift S VR, I went and bought the HP Reverb after reading so many positive reviews about its sharpness. Now I am able to read most of the text on the instrument panel. I think the HP Reverb is much better for flight sim than the Rift S. The only problem that I have now is the difficulities with controlling the airplane's knobs and switches while using VR. It seems that there is no good way to easily control the instrument panel while using VR. I really wish that there is some kind of glove that would allow hand and finger interactions with the airplane. Otherwise, it is really really tough to enjoy VR flying.

today is a really sad day for me. My motion sim went up in smoke and nothing is moving any more.

It started with a troublesome motor that I always have a problem with since the beginning of this built. It is the motor on axis1A of the sim. I found that sometimes this motor wouldn't move at all because the carbon brush stuck in the open position. Each time that this happened I had to open up the motor and clean the contact and brush housing so that it would work again. That happened over a dozen times in the course of the last few years.

So when the motor stopped moving again last week, I again opened up the motor housing, cleaned the brush and put it back again. Then, it worked for a few seconds before I saw the smoke filled up the room. I checked the motor and it is cool and I didn't see any smoke from it and I had problem identifying the source of the smoke. I disconnected the motor and try to restart the system but nothing would work anymore.

I tested and saw that there is still communication from the PC to the arduino micro so I think the arduino controller is still good. So it is possible that the saber tooth board or the power supply is gone.

I am having problem understanding why would all the motors stopped working all at the same time. The motors are connected to two different saber tooth units and two different power supplies. So if one of the saber tooth or power supply is burned out then that shouldn't effect the other motors on the other saber tooth, right?

I still don't understand how cleaning of the motor brush could have caused the burn out of the whole sim??? If anybody has an idea please let me know.

I think there had to be a short. My best guess is in the motor brush where I was cleaning and reassembling it. The most likely thing that happened was the electrical wire that connect the carbon brush happened to touch the metal surface of the motor cover.

I am just not able to figure out why would that caused all the motors to stop working. I thought that if there was a short then only the shorted motor and its board would burn but not all of them.

With a help of a friend, I was able to lift up the rig and found out where it was burned.

First we measured the motor winding and connection on the axis1a motor (front motor) and that one shorted to ground. This was the motor that I was cleaning the brush and I left it in a state where its brush cable touched the metal cylinder of the motor. The motor is not burned. After tugged in the cable, the motor is no longer shorted.

Second, we found that the ground connections between the arduino micro and the two sabertooth boards were completely burned and melted. We replaced these ground connections with good ones. The sabertooth green LEDs are still on so we were hoping that the sabertooth boards are still ok.

Third we checked the power supplies and they were ok. They both showed 24v on the output.

Fourth we checked the connection to the arduino micro and was able to compile and program it without issue.

Thinking that the problem might just be the melted ground connections, we tried to power up the rig and test its motion. However, nothing moved. We checked the pwm signal on the arduino and it appears to have some square wave signal even without any motion. At this point I am not sure if the arduino is still good or not. I think I will replace it and see how it will go. After that if it still not working then I'll try replacing the sabertooth boards. Those are a lot more expensive than the arduino.

I found out that we didn't connect the ground connection between the sabertooth and the Arduino correctly. I made the correction and all motors were working well except for the front motor. It constantly shaking and wouldn't settled down quietly like the others. I tried to replace the potentiometer but that didn't work either. If you have some ideas that could help me then I would appreciate that a lot

I found out that the sabertooth and the Arduino ground was wrong. After fixing the connection then all the motors worked well except for the front motor. It kept on shaking all the time and wouldn't settled down like the others. If you have an idea please let me know. Thank you

Today is a great day! I found the issue. It was a polarity on the motor power connection. After I reverse the polarity then the problem went away. I am happy to have the simulator working again. Flight simulation is just not the same without the motion rig.