My Sim Build - Project FTO

A little more progress to report.

Keyboard Matrix

To finish this build, the first thing is to mount the circuit board (shown in one of the pictures in my previous post). The board is going in with the other boards in the engine bay. Now, rather than go directly from the keyboard matrix to the 36 sockets, for the ease of being able to remove the components separately when required, i'm going to ad an extra little board with connectors. Both these boards are pictured below attached to a perspex sheet that will slot in with the other circuit boards:



The wires surrounded by the black plastic corrugated tubing go to the 36 sockets. For the sockets i'm using 3.5mm 3 pin headphone jack sockets.

These are cheap to buy, easy to use and I happened to have a stack on hand from an earlier project. I drilled 36 holes in a U shaped piece of aluminium to house these. I thought this would provide a nice strong support and look reasonable in the process. This however was a mistake and resulted in a stack of wasted time. It took me quite a while to work out why my mapping wasn't working. In the end, I found that one of the wires on the pins on the socket I needed to use was connected to the threaded bit in the picture above. As a result every plug was earthed to the metal bracket. So, I did it again with a plastic angle bracket. Here is the result:



So I now I had the sockets in place, they needed to be wired based on the mapping in the previous post. I have to say that this was a bit of a nightmare. A very tight space and lots of wires just doesn't mix well with a hot soldering iron. Also, I did have some issues with my mapping. It seems that following the traces by eye is prone to error. In the end I had to re-do with a multi meter to get everything right.

In the end I was able to test each letter and number using notepad in windows. When I plug in a 3.5 mm audio plug with the pins joined into a socket, that letter appears in notepad. As soon as i could get every letter and every number, I knew I was done.

So the programmable matrix is now complete. I have since wired in the tip shifters to this and can successfully generate the keyboard letter I wish to map to in notepad when I hold it down. Here is a pic with the tip shifters wired in (left to 'E' and right to 'Q'):



Clutch

The other progress i've made is with the clutch. In the last post, id attached the fulcrum, but has not sorted the tension spring. First I needed to drill a hole at the top of the fulcrum. Once i'd done this, I realised I may not need a particularly strong spring to do the job as the lever compensates for this. So I thought i'd revisit the boot shock concept I was using earlier. And it worked (sort of). When pressing the pedal, at the very bottom it felt pretty good. I thought if I elongated the plunger in the master cylinder it might fix it, but no. So new master cylinder. Here is the result:



Was a bit too hard to depress though, so made it adjustable by drilling some more holes (see above). The third hole down comes pretty close to the real thing.

So, that pretty much covers the progress to date. We bought some speakers to make into transducers this week and my son is back on a uni break starting this weekend, so hoping to pump out some of the electrical work that still needs to be done very soon.