Showroom Moving without travelling - 1dof project

Hi Everyone, I am Alex from Italy and I would like to share my cockpit as it is about to became a 1DOF....maybe 2DOF depending on how satisfied I feel afterwards.

First of all I'd like to tell the story behind the project:

It all started before I built my gaming PC as I was playing Assetto Corsa and Arma 3 with a laptop, a TV, T300 on the kitchen table and pedals on the floor against a cardboard box. So i decided I wanted to get more confortable in my gaming while I was waiting to build a proper gaming pc.

So I have been thinking for days and days and making possible projects in my head and then I decided I wanted to use all the stuff I collected over the years...I like to give things a second life!
Meanwhile I decided to add even some flying controllers to fly Aeroplanes and Helycopters on Arma 3.....I wanted to build everything myself so I started to gather all the hidden things from the garage.

I found then a broken 20 years old F15 joystick, a small Step machine for home-gym, a seat from my old ford Fiesta, and handbrake bar, a broken 10 inches Samsung Tablet, a couple of old pc PSU, and old set of sourround speakers, an heater found in the rubbish and fixed and some metal frames from an old scaffold.....so I started the build.....
.....I had no idea that it would have become a never ending project!

Phase 1:

In little time i manged to "finish" the initial project:
I first started with the Joystick so I made the new one out of that F15 old guy connecting everything to a LeoBodnar board and adding a digital 2 axis thumb stick taken from a broken PS4 pad....I also put a vibrating motor inside the grip for some BRRTTTTTTTTTT feeling;



Then I made a temporary simple back and forward throttle without buttons:



and a simple Up-Down collective out of the handbrake bar:




I revived the 10 inches screen of the broken tablet with a chinese driver board to have a second tactical screen:



I made the whole metal frame and covered it with plywood (as I don't really like open cockpits), I mounted the thrustmaster T300 with the plastic pedals still on the floor,
then I placed the Fiesta Seat inside the structure and fixed it with some anti-vibrating supports so that the vibrations from the future bass shaker will not transfer to the structure and to the floor waking up all the neighbours:

finally I put few buttons here and there, made some connections, added some Green back lights in the cockpit and that was it...



....I was happy!

But soon after I finished the fairly simple first build, I assembled my Gaming PC.....and then is when the real problems arrived......a new world opened up as I discovered and tried DCS, IL2, ACC in VR.....and that was the start of the end!!! It all started a freaking process in my little brainbox....

I felt the need to develop the cockpit to be more immersive and functional but also VR friendy....I also needed a proper HOTAS...proper rudder pedals...proper everything!.....and as you all know, in one way or another, this is a road without end...

So phase 2 started...

I re-started by making the rudder pedals out of the "home-gym step", connected via the same LeoBodnar board as the Joystick, where I changed the angle of the pedals, removed the original pistons to put two big hard springs instead and added a bass shaker.....I am still waiting to add an hydraulic damper for a better feling.



I added one Bass Shakers under the seat. Both shakers are driven by "Sim Hub" and "SimShaker for aviators" through a 500Watts Sony car amp:



I added to the joystick two oil dampers home made by modifying two cheap gas springs:



I bought some fanatec pedals for Sim Racing and I made an adjustable support for them to keep them in the right spot and at the right angle. Right behind them I have mounted the heater/fan which is controlled from its switch mounted in the top right pannel:



In order to have more push buttons I had to add 3 cheap usb boards( at that time I had no idea on how to use arduino boards) so then I made a proper throttle with many buttons and encoder:



the major recent update has been on the collective....with the come out of the AH64 Apache in DCS, I transformed the simple collective into a proper one , driven by an Arduino Leonardo ( I had to learn a little coding), with buttons, 4 way switches, 2 way switches and an hydraulic damper....the result ended up being great and with a great feeling ( I still have to close the back with some plexiglas though):



Just to finish the job I've integrated an 2.1 amplifier audio board connected to the old sourround speakers and subwoofer....it was the end of my social life.....but not completely.....not yet at least...
Here some pictures of the cockpit at his latest stage:



Two years ago a friend of mine gave me a brand new electric steering servo for the Toyota Yaris because he knows that I always make all sort of things.....and I have been thinking for a while what to do with it......at first, after I saw a project for a DIY Steering wheel, I planned to build a kind of direct drive steering wheel for sim racing using an arduino Leonardo.....

Unfortunately my zero understanding of coding and almost no time/no brain to learn it, held me back from going with it....so I had to put the steering servo motor on hold.....until two days ago...

Phase 3:

A year ago I found on this forum the SMC3 project for Arduino UNO and I was so excited that I decided that I wanted to put some real motion under the seat.....so I registered to the website to gather as many informations as I could because I really had no idea where to start from.

I started by getting the Arduino UNO, the cheap 43 amps controller and a 12 Volts 50 amps power supply....
Once again I had to put the project on stand-by because I went away for ten months for work and I haven't had the chance to really put my head onto it.....until two days ago....

I finally felt that the time was mature and two days ago I put my head down to setup the first test......so I downloaded all the softwares, uploaded the code on the UNO, connected the UNO to the H-Bridge, connected a wiper motor from the Fiesta and the 12v power supply to the 43amps bridge......and that is the moment when the magic happened!!!

So happy with the result I started a two days spasmodic research on the web to find the right motors.......until today.....when the toyota electric steering weel servo came back on my mind of course I tested it right away and the result was fantastic....it seems to have plenty of speed and power and torque....and mainly it should last for at least 400.000 kilometers ))

So for now the idea is to modify the seat support adding a pivot point to make a 1DOF with only one motor for the pitch as I would like to recreate the kick in the ass of the catapult during take off from the carrier or the fast deceleration after catching the wire while landing on the ship....I'd like also to feel heavy impacts or bumps on the runways.

Many say that there should be the "Roll" effect too but I believe that because of the constant positive Gs during a turn,on a plane, the body doesn't really feel the roll....and if it does? Oh well....I don't care! I'm happy with just the pitch......for now....

So the next step, before modifying the seat and mounting things, is to do a test to see how the motor reacts to the telemetry of the game.....so i have downloaded a free DCS plugin to jump right in the game.....but I discovered that the demo version of SimTools is limited

I have a few videos of different tests but unfortunately they are too big to be uploaded....I have to find the way to resize them. If I do I might upload them later on.
Meanwhile here some pictures I took of the motor during the tests (can't really see much):



Anyways if you took the time to read it all then you truly are an HERO!

Is has been more than 3 years now since I started the whole project and I hope you did enjoy the reading....
If you have any questions fell free to ask.

Thank you all,

Ciao.

Good job !

Thanks

Good Day Everyone!

So I have been trying for the last 2 hours to upload some video on my new youtube account as my old one got hacked badly and then banned for spam....the busy man who hacked my account posted something like 80+ videos a day of rubbish and then, a couple of days later, I lost my account.....anyways...

I am trying to upload the videos just like normal videos but instead YouTube uploads them as "shorts" and I can't find the way to change them to normal videos.

Because of that I can't post the videos here because the "Media" upload tool does not accept "shorts" links

Any suggestions??

Thanks.

For now I managed to upload only 2 videos which randomly ended up to be normal:

Collective HOCAS Pot sliding Test:


Collective HOCAS board and thumb sticks


I will try to post more videos tomorrow because I have been trying too many times to upload them and YouTube blocked me again.....just for 24 hours

Hi!
As I said here are the other videos:

Collective HOCAS board and test:





Collective Hydraulic Damper Test:

Rudder Movement test ( hydraulic damper still to be added):




First 1dof motor movement test:


I will send updates once I'll start working at the seat.

Ciao.