Linkup 2DOF Wood VR Motion Rig

Now they are stuck. Man I miss that time when I was actually sending commands and the motors would move...

Here's the entire electronics setup.

It was a wiring problem. A short in the pot wiring made me unstack the boards and I never rewired it properly. Going to test it later today. Also if you have a continuous spinning motor consider switching A0 and A1. Make sure the potentiometer wires are not being affected by touching each other or touching nearby metal. My motors seem to sometimes get stuck, it's like they can't find the midpoint and they need to be moved a tad, maybe a change in the code can fix that.

Finally sending commands again. One of my motors is reversed so it's a little confusing trying to set things up in the code. I wish it documented things and ranges a bit more and their relation to a motion rig. Trying to get both motors in the same horizontal position, but maybe these POTs are more the problem than the code or motors.

I switched out the pots to 10 turn wire pots and the right motor is working, but now the left with the same type of pot doesn't. While testing it I see that it only changes direction at the pots maximum turn/value and doesn't stop in the middle like the code had it do before. It worked just fine before with the other pot on this motor and it behaved as expected the the right motor, but the left is messed up. Thought I was done lol.

Here's the pot, ignore the wiring. The brown is the control and the blue is ground, yellow/green is 5v.

Edit: Turns out the pot was broke. No problem, it was about $1.50 for two.

Or just save yourself the headache and buy some quality hall effect pots and be done with it.

I had to try and I did learn something along with the headache lol

I grabbed a few 6127V1A180L.5 as suggested on here.

Finally got it working! I've got the motors at half speed right now while I start tweaking things so it can be as accurate and responsive as possible. Even at half speed I'm kind of surprised at how quick it can move. Any setting tips for what I should aim for is welcome. Had to stop for today as it's late and the PSU was getting very hot, I've got a cpu fan I can blow on it. The motors are barely warm though so I might not need to attempt my cooling solution. Big thanks to Nick, Noorbeast, RacingMat, and anyone else I bothered. I finally feel like I'm halfway to making this thing do what I want it to do. I'll post a celebratory video later as I still need to get pitch working as when I tried it in LFS it was only roll. Cheers!

Edit: My mistake, roll is working.

So basically what happened is that the M8 rod bent. It couldn't handle the full 100% pitch back and roll left during a War Thunder session. It was feeling pretty good until that happened. Switching to M10 this week and then I'll put up a video if all goes well. I should have my Rift whenever the next batch ships to Sweden. Can't wait to put this rig together with it. Hoping for a good result.

M10 also has the possibility to bend if your using a long enough length. Sleeve that sucker to prevent it from happening again.

Okay why not. I've seen those type of metal shaft before so it shouldn't be difficult to do.

Mine is a Simple 3/4" round tube with M10 Bolts on either end.

I got it moving again. I just began to tweak settings so this is just a first test clip. I'll brace the back of the lower frame and the front of the upper frame to fix the wobbling and then continue to tweak settings. I wanted the Roll and Pitch to be smoother and the surge and sway to be more rough, but surge even at 80% doesn't seem to get much of a reaction.



Tol=0 (for maximum resolution/accuracy)
Brakingdistance=5 (higher and lower values don't seem to change much?)

Anyway, here are my PID in the arduino code.

pwm=195;
if (gap>50) pwm=215;
if (gap>75) pwm=235;
if (gap>100) pwm=255;
pwm=map(pwm, 0, 255, 0, pwmMax);

and my SimTools settings:

Roll 30%
Pitch 40%
Surge 80%
Sway 60%
Heave 15%
Yaw 15%

These are definitely off, but this is what I'm starting with so that I can track the change in feel while seated. I haven't touched smoothing, washout, deadzone, or boundary yet. I'm thinking I will apply a bit of smoothing to Pitch and Roll though.

Dang, forgot all about that part. Thanks.

DONT test in the rain either,....that's not going to help you AT all.....Also you want to test with a generic car, No crazy 1000hp Race car....something with decent power and will allow you to turn repeatable laps and monitor what the game data/motion is doing....Tuning is a Thing that takes Time, there's No way to speed up the tweaking and tuning process unless you get on skype or something and we can answer those unique question's your Surely have about the data/simtools and how it all works together. Let us know and good luck.

The camera mount I made works fairly well, it's mounted under the block of wood holding the wheel and has springs wedge between it and the wheel to absorb is vibration form the wheel's force feedback. The biggest problem was that the cord would have the camera tilting to much when there was quick surge rig movement, easily fixed. I did slide in my seat a bit as I was racing, but turning down the sway helped. The other problem is that I'm using about 170 PWM at the gap > 25 setting in the arduino code and these motors can't move the rig from the maximum forward or back pitch/surge angle. They simply get stuck so you have to limit the angle or if I increase the power I lose the accuracy and smooth movement. Running the rig with such limited angles kind of works, but I'm not sure if the effect isn't more like a bass shaker than a motion simulator. I think it's time to start considering my next build. In the mean time I will just use it as a static rig, making it modular made it easy to turn it into a static rig.

If you gonna use it more for car games than flight sims, I recomend you other configuration, and to forget the yaw.
Remember to configure this for each game, you can use diferents setups. This is my example for life for speed.
don´t forget to configure the tuning center.
axis percent tuning center max min
Roll 12% 6 -6
Pitch 12% 5 -5
Surge 45% 4 -8
Sway 45% 7 -7
Heave 10% 0.7 -0.7
Yaw 0%

starting with these values you won´t take to the max of limits and still feel all the bumps and g forces