My 6DOF build with OSW and Overhung Hydraulic Pedal Set

Good evening
DHL delivered the package from WUXI HXW BEARING.

Initial impression: Packaging was very well done, as you can see thick foam at the bottom and top, 3 ball screws staggered in second layer of foam with cutout for FK15 End Supports and 30x40 Plum Couplings ( keyed on both ends as requested ) and Ball Nut Mounting Blocks. Everything was individually packaged as well and bagged as well.

Plum Couplers: Absolutely 0 play and impossible to pull apart at this point by hand !! Perfect fit on MiGE shaft and Machined Ball Screw end. Sadly would have wished they would have included the 3mm Key but no biggie its not the end of the world and can source that myself.

FK15 Ball Screw Supports: they seem to be ok, will tear then down later as they seen to need a tad bit of adjustment, seems like some bearing are not fully settled and will need some adjustment... for the price... I'm not complaining.

Ball Screws : Well they finally made it !!! 2010's 1100mm length keyed. Looks like rolled and precision ground. Will take one with me to my buddies machine shop and take some measurements and index them to see accuracy... Needed ?? Probably not. do i want to know what i paid for... I SURE DO !!

Here's a few more shots..

Now time to shower, eat and hit the bed... its been a long day at work and got 1 more day then 3 days off to goof off in Fusion360 and start drawing up a few parts. first to 3d print, then to take a chunk of aluminum and make some chips!
Good Night everyone, and thanks for following along

Quick update....

Got busy with fusion and learned a few things as well as gotten way more faster at drawing up from measurements

Even added a low end stop switch in there as well as a hole to fish the wires through... and sent the file to octopi and let the 3D printer go nuts!!


Looks pretty good, but need to clearance a few things still as its a tad tight ( 0.01 clearance and also have some plastic shrinkage from print cooling ) and move bolt hole over a tad for the end stop switch.

Other than that its ready for the machine shop... time to go billet shopping

I guess I'm overdue for an update on this project!

Work has been extremely busy and not much happened since the last update :

1. Ordered oDrive v3.6 ( 56VDC No Connectors ) - x3
2. Ordered Teensy 4.1 - x1
3. Ordered Enclosure for oDrives - x4 ( one for teensy as well )
4. Ordered 2.5" x 4" ( 63.5mm x 101.50mm) - 160mm long - x3 ( Metal Supermarket )
5. Ordered 48V 31A 1500W power supplies - x3
6. Ordered Encoder connectors from TE - x10 Male, x10 Female ( M12 Standard Circular Connector - 8Pin )


Other than that I have been mainly just figuring small things out... bare with me here as pipe measurements are imperial and not metric still here. Plan is to use T6061 Aluminum for everything unless other noted, body will be 5" x 0.120" ( 127mm x 3.24mm ) and piston rod will be 1.750" X 0.120" ( 44.46mm x 3.24mm ) both of which are seamless round tube.

Reason for such a large actuator outer casing diameter is because it clears the servo body as well as the wire stays. Overall length will be 1360mm ( ordering 1370mm to have room to machine faces flat as they are cut on band saw and they aren't very accurate and terrible finish to boot ), a 13.5mm slot will be cut to allow wires to pass through and will 3D print a proper wire stop to bolt directly to actuator body. Billet lower mount will be machined fit in the main body and will be clearanced around the encoder to strengthen lower body, while top cap/guide will be oversize to accept a Delrin / HDPE bearing to allow smooth movement of piston rod. Piston assembly will be 4.650" x 2" ( 118.11mm x 50.80mm ) which again gives me some wiggle room to add a Delrin / HDPE ring and will be a split design that will be bolted together to hold the ring in place, while the ball screw bolts directly into it. The Piston Rod as this will not only provide good rigidity but also will clear the ball nut outside diameter, however some "witch craft" and maybe some trickery will be needed to make it do what I want and that is a mounting flange for the ball nut to directly bolt into... which may require some heat / liquid nitrogen and a press to achieve the desired thickness of 13mm. I'm spending this afternoon working out a few drawings in Fusion360 this afternoon.

On a side note... I had some time to tear open the MiGE servos and have a look to see what encoders they used and was pleasant surprised!! They use Tamagawa Seiki 48-2500P8-L6-5V rotary encoders. I had ran across them in the past from when I worked as millwright and they were one of the better ones I had came across with in terms of noise rejection and overall reliability, so I'm quite happy.


The above mentioned billet pieces are going to be custom heat sinks for the oDrive boards. if anyone needs the model of the 0Drive V3.6 boards, it is available on GrabCAD ( ignore the v3.4 as they are mechanically identical ) and they will drop into a hole that will be milled into the top of the cases listed above. May need to track down a high current connector for the power supply side...

I REALLY need to finish building the actuators in Fusion and start actually perform a simulation to verify range of movement!!

I just realized I haven't even mentioned a word about the power supplies!

Been digging deep through Alibaba and found Jiangxi Mingwei Electronic Co
They seemed to have what I was looking for and to top it off they offer a 2 year warranty on their product.

Figured was worth a shot and the price was right as well, because at $60USD each unit is HALF the cost of a Meanwell.

Either way I have ordered 4x 48V units and will report back with results.



Looks very clean and may end up milling out a custom end cap to hide that hideous connection strip as well as a Panel Mounted IEC C14 with a switch and fuse holder as well as room for a cable gland for the output.

Thank you for the kind words sir,
All we can do is build to my liking and take pride in what we do, not only in our personal life but also treat like were building it for someone else. Like most in this expensive hobby, the best we can do is wait and take advantage of the open market place and build with the best components one can afford. This may take more time but beats buying off the shelf and a sense of pride when its completed. I've given myself 2 years to fully complete this project, but it looks like i maybe completed by Christmas

Good evening everyone
Monday night update night !!

I have been slowly working on things as they arrived... and ordered a few more things as some things off eBay never made it, so I have been working with what I had at hand

As seen above finally got around to make a mount for the haptic motor, and was able to mount it onto the brake pedal assembly with ease. It's clamped into place fairly securely as well.

As mentioned in an earlier post... I was looking at that GP Steering Wheel on Cults3D and I ended pulling the trigger and purchasing the STL files. I have to say i am very tempted to have it carved out of billet as well

So with that being said... ordered a few more things lol

With what had arrived, I've gotten busy and put it together... can be seen above that i have been keeping busy with the small stuff... oDrives have still not arrived but they are on their way, same goes for the Teensy, but was able to get some proper connectors from TE

Those will be power and encoder plugs as the weird ones that came on the encoders had no spare room for anything else and wanted a few extra pins for future expansion, but not only that but also to make servicing easier if a power supply or oDrive ever failed would make life easy to diagnose. Also have some very nice sealed data connectors for serial and can bus implementation and maybe even usb as its 8 pins would give me flexibility

Put together some DC cables from power supply to oDrives today as well, still waiting on the back clam shells to arrive to fully complete and secure the ends to prevent pulling the cables out.
Speaking of which...

Ordered some more IEC C14 Fused and switched connectors as having 2 kids that WILL get excited and trip over cables... will trip and unplug something. Hopefully this will prevent that!

Lastly on the list will be wiring up that GP wheel and coding a Arduino Pro Micro ( hopefully ) to have all the buttons, encoders and rotary switch to function without the loss of the WS2812b Strip.

That's all for now, but hopefully more stuff shows up so I can make some more headway.

Well.. TE came through again and cable retainers showed up today and decided to quickly assemble the back ends.


Other than that Amazon dropped off the KW10 micro switch for the paddle shifting assembly and it fits like a glove!!

I was going to assemble the other end of the DC connector, but realized it took my crimpers back to work this morning :/
Guess I will do that tomorrow... that's if i remember to grab them.
Tracked the rest of my packages and looks like a few things will arrive throughout the week, but will keep you guys posted!

Well..
Tuesday night update, since i missed to post this yesterday :

Nothing special to report, Teensy was never shipped out due to concern with import fees and because i missed the email the order was cancelled. Wilwood master cylinders are still somewhere in the mail, same with the enclosures for the oDrives. Right now waiting on the IGS Files from the gentleman that designed that GP wheel as i have a few changes in mind and its too much work to import and mesh and turn it into a solid model in Fusion360. Plan is to fuse the display module and front plate as 1 and reduce the number of exposed fasteners.
once that has been accomplished i will take the files to my friend and he can let his 4 axis machine loose on a piece of billet aluminum

Evening gents

Mailbag tore open last week !
Felt like christmas with 2 or 3 packages arriving everyday LOL

Been keeping busy and monday instead of posting an update was playing around with the oDrives and Teensy

First off...
Needed to replace of the encoder plugs as they weren't fitting my needs

As can be seen above, there is 5 extra wires for future proofing as I do no want to EVER change anything once I fab these. As can seen i even went as far as sleeving the signal cable... And don't worry the power cable will get the same treatment, it just so it happened that I ran out of expandable loom.

Here's the Old Pin-Out ( 15 pin )

New Pin-out / Updated Plug ( 19 Pin )

Funny part is that out of all those wires oDrive only uses 5 of them :
1 -> 5V+
2 -> A+
3 -> B+
4 -> Z+ ( Index Signal )
5 -> GND
On a side note, another coincidence is that I picked a 5 wire flat ribbon cable using Black as GND and leaving me with 4 usable GPIO which means that I used all of the GPIO's between the 2 Servos

Next on the list was to test and see if I can make things "move" ...

I did spent the better part of Monday playing around picking brains and sorting things out. By the end of the night I updated the firmware several times, tried different settings and still no joy making it work with Mover.

Either way... This is the Settings i used for my MiGE 80ST-M02430 servos :

Yesterday night decided to do something a tad more productive and figure out my main motion controller...


The power supply is a 5V 4A unit + Teensy 4.1 + 2x 8MB PSRAM chips + Ethernet Kit and a 16GB MicroSD Card as I have a few laying around collecting dust which became a why not LOL
The 3 connectors on the top is for the 3 oDrives, One side AMP Twist lock is for the Control Box ( E-Stop, Park, Enable ) as well as Micro USB and on the opposite end we have the IEC receptacle ( Fused, Switched and with cord retention ) and 10/100 LAN

The ebay/china Cases could not be anymore perfect !!

oDrives will fit with about 10mm to spare and just enough room for the large power and encoder connectors height wise too!!
Next few days will be spent working on a custom heatsink for the oDrives to bolt to and then a hole will be milled in the top to accept the "module" and will resemble a plate amplifier found on the back of a home theater subwoofer and this will also be shared with the braking resistor.

Heatsink size will be 150mm x 100mm x 25mm ( L x W x H ) and will be carved out of a solid chunk of billet.
A "window" will be cut above SW1 ( DFU / CAN Switch ) for ease of updating / use and i will be printing a clear lens for the power LED so one can verify status.

Other than that I got 2 of the 3 wilwood master cylinder and got to work to mount them to the pedal assemblies...

I mounted the haptic feedback motor to the brake pedal with a 3d printed retainer.
As can be seen i have been busy lol

Friday Update:

Was too excited with the arrival of this lil gem not to share

SimuCUBE Wireless Wheel Receiver !
I ordered this months ago and it finally arrived !!

Fits like a glove... may even get a bit adventurous and 3d print me a temporary mount for the big mige and take a swing and have some fun... but at the same time I don't have the pedals ready just yet and no shifter either

Hi everyone!
Its been a little while since I posted an update...

Between work and being 1 of the 2 techs in the shop i was quite busy for the past 2 months. I didn't quite nearly got as much accomplished as I would have liked to, but there is progress to share, but alas here we go!

1. SEAT
Linked up with a local Sparco dealer and the seat has been chosen and ordered. Luckily for me he had a set in "stock" ( someone else ordered a pair ) and was able to perform a fit test

Ordered the matching belts and gloves as well.

2. oDrive
Since I had 4 of the 6 servos re-pinned and replaced the encoder connector, it was time to start working on the enclosures and heat sink. YES I know I probably dont need a heatsink, but i already have bought the aluminum ( ~ $40 for the 4 pieces ) and the machining isn't costing me a penny, so why not ? So... from Fusion360 :

to my 3D printer :

and a quick dry fit to verify fit :

Everything lines up perfect !! File has been emailed and dropping material off Friday
Next on this project was the connector retainer plates as the enclosure I'm using is a split design with the connectors on the side of the case would mean that only half the connector would be attached to each half and that would mean bolting them in place would be a pain, sooo...

Once complete quickly set off to the printer, and...

Quick test fit...

Now to make a few more

And that would be enough for 3 enclosures, however need a sure fire way to make everything to line up.
So, back to Fusion and derive from the original and make a template!

Perfect... now off to the printer !!

Still on the agenda for today is finishing up the last 2 servos and as I'm typing this the template is being printed and is about 40% complete. well check in again later with and update and more pictures!

great stuff so far hope all is still going well any update on your pedals im looking at using the same assembly ,what are you gonna use to mount them