Showroom DIY Racing simulator end assestment

My name is Rick and i'm building a racing simulator for my end assesment. I'm doing this project on a Intermediate vocational education (correct me if i'm wrong, the name is MBO in the Netherlands) school in the Netherlands. I'll share some work in this thread.
My starting day was a week ago (13 November 2017) so i'm just starting.

I'm planning to do the movements with a muscle cilinder (Dutch translation: spiercilinder) because i can move them fast in a presice position.
I want to read the signals out with a microprocessor like a micro controller like a Arduino. I'm planning to program the Arduino with Atmel Studio in the C language.

I'll post a new update if i've something new to share.

My apologies for the poor english.

Thank you for your interests!

what type of sim do you want to build ? 2dof / 3dof /6dof ?

there is arduino code from SMC3 that you can download

Emh.. Where does that dof stand for? Havn't heard from those terms yet.
I can take a look at that code for guidelines but I see it as a interesting challenge to program it from scratch. (okay from the point that the data comes in over the com port)

Oh i forgot to mention that those muscle cilinders are working with pneumatics. Those can be controlled with a 0-10v analog signal if i'm correct.

Oke thnx,
I think 6DOF but we're not 100% sure yet

With normal silinders you would get that bounching effect yes but we are using muscle cilinders. These work differently. This controller and cilinder are working with well balanced pressure actuators. The Muscle cilinder functions exactly as the name impliece. Like a Muscle.
It also isn't the case that we want the most precice movements because you won't simply notice it. All I want is to have a variabele output and make it affortable (also in use and maintaince)

After several hours programming and problem solving i've managed to get some voltage changing happening.
I've programmed the arduino myself, still in the Arduino IDE language (what is also in C by the way) but i'm going to write this code again in the plain C language if i can get the I2C working there. I'll keep you informed after some more progression is made.

Hey everyone! best wishes for the new year!

I've posted an other video where i showcase how a muscle cilinder reacts to the game movements. I've used a setup from school for this test.

The muscle cilinder is a single acting cilinder so it is reacting a bit slower when the spring pushes the cilinder up. I'm planning to use a double acting muscle cilinder for my simulator.

At this time i'm by the way not focused on this simulator project because i've multiple projects running at the moment. That is why i'm not posting that much now.

I'm hoping to post some more progress about the frame soon!

The frame design has finaly been designed and aproved by my teacher. The materials are ordered and we hope it does arive this wednesday.
We're pretty close to the completion date so we hope to have this frame assambled as soon as possible.


Also the PCB has been delivered so it's time to assamble it now.


I'll post a update again if some progress is made

The frame is being assambled. End of this week i hope i can callibrate it!

Forgot to post this, my print is fully assambled and tested. Only 2 errors were occouring while testing. I couldn't get a response from the processor so i connected an external Arduino Uno to the pins to test it again. Seems i've looked wrong at the RX and TX pins while designing couse those were swapped. I swapped those again by cutting the existing trace and made a new connection with some wires. Now i get a respond from the processor. The second issue i have is that the Op-Amps are not working yet. (that place where a chip is missing on the second picture) I'm going to replace those now and double check the schematic and connections to be shure those will work. I'll update again if i can get this working or if i have any more issues.

@noorbeast is it possible to send a inverted value to the arduino controller? Like in the interface that you put for example <255-axis1> ik work with the serial interface in hexadecimal values.
If not, can i put a minimum instead of a maximum value in axis limiting?
Also if i send a hexadecimal number below 16 it won't update anything in my arduino, what output does it have below 16? (for example with format: [A<axis1>] the output: [A0B] or [AB] if i send a number of 0X0B)

My thanks in advance.