Simulated Wind using MonsterMoto and ArduinoUno

I can't confirm that without testing the 220uH on the scope.

You can try and see of you can get either of these shipped to your country

http://uk.farnell.com/abracon/atca-08-471m-v/inductor-470uh-7a-20-radial/dp/2665051

https://www.digikey.co.uk/product-detail/en/abracon-llc/ATCA-08-471M-V/535-13514-ND/6137815

Thanks Richard,

Will try if i can get some of those tommorow when i come back from our road trip to Heusinkveld Enginering.

Me and couple of friends are driving up there tommorow. We're gonna try the HE-ultimates, HE shifter, HE handbrake and the HE 80/20 rig.

I'm also very curious about the SimSteering V2 compared to my AccuForce.

Should be a fun day

Sounds like a fun day!!

Made good progress on the suppressor box.







Still need to finish the base and the mounting supports for the inductors.

The suppressor box looks really great Richard.

Thanks for your links of the suppressor. Those sites ended up being too expensive with shipping included though and with still 5-10 business days shipping.

I went for the ones on aliexpress by @manzes82 , so the waiting game begins......

The Heusinkveld trip was great fun.

Niels wasn't there, but Svend gave us a great reception. We spend 4,5 hours driving in the 2 rigs and talking sim gear.

hébergeur image gratuit

They never heard of wind simulator before, so i'm gonna send them a video tomorow

We end up taking home a HE-rig, 2 HE-shifters and a set of HE-pros.

Finished the design of my suppressor box design.

Just printing out the first one now.







I put a little center divider inside the box

Printed my first suppressor box.



I made it a little bit bigger than the inductors that I am using in case anyone wants to put different inductors and or caps/diodes inside the box.





This is the base plate of the suppressor box





The board and lid is secured using captive hex nuts and has 3 mounting holes so you can mount the box to your rig.



Here is it next to a blower

Did you pay or were they for free ?

Good work dude looks great.

Could you not make one to fit all in one box ?

I was thinking of that but then I was also thinking if people had their blowers in different locations they might want a suppressor box close to each blower.

I have figured out how I am going to mount these on my full wind simulators I sell, there will be one on each side and I will change the cable entry a bit.

Just an idea Richard to make your windsimulator look even a bit better:

Remove the seaflow sticker , 3d print letters "Simwind" on glue them on top like this:

I was thinking about doing that but I opted not to for a couple of reasons.

1. Most of my simulators I sell without the blowers because it is much cheaper, especially with shipping from New Zealand for the end user to supply the blowers themselves, I provide all the crimps so all they need to do is crimp the blower cables and plug them it. You can buy Seaflo blowers for $22USD each, with free shipping in the USA. Here in NZ they cost twice as much and it bumps the shipping up to $130NZD because they weigh 1.4KG for a pair of blowers. This is also why I have heaps of different options based on the end users DIY skill, having said that I do have a stock pile of 8 Seaflo blowers and my NZ supplier has them back in stock so I don't need to import them from USA anymore.

2. I was a bit worried about them falling off in shipping, I would hate to have a customer receive one with missing letters.

3. I want to let the end user know that they are receiving a genuine Seaflo and not one of the cheap Chinese knock off Seaflo's.

I don't if you have seen one of the cheap Chinese Seaflo's but physically they look almost identical except for the fact they don't say Seaflo and they have 3 very minor outwards differences.

The performance on the other hand is shocking from the cheap Chinese one, it is slower, draws less current and the bearings are noisy as anything. I brought a pair just for a laugh to see how bad they were, there is no way I would sell them so I only use them as a spare pair for testing.

Here are some photos so you can see just how close they are in appearance.

From the top they look pretty close. The only difference in this shot was the sticker, and all they did was remove the word "Seaflo" even the "Connect to + only" sticker is the same.



From the motor side they also look almost the same, there is a slight difference on the vane, the Seaflo has a little tiny bulge near the motor side of the vane. At first I thought they were the same moulding but this and another difference means they are different moulds so they are just very close copies. I also think the motor is of lesser quality because it is slower and noisier.



On the fan side you can spot the most obvious difference, the Genuine Seaflo's have a black fan and the cheap Chinese knock off has a white fan.



Also on the bottom you see the other moulding difference. One the Seaflo, on the mounting bracket that is a couple of vertical reinforcements where the Chinese knock off has only horizontal reinforcement. The grommet on the Chinese one is a little smaller. It is interesting that the serial number is exactly the same on both.



The boxes are also pretty similar except for the lack of the word Seaflo, this is what tipped me off on the Ebay listing. The printing and colour is also a little worse on the Chinese version.



The manual is also pretty similar, just basically removed the words Seaflo.





The back page is bit weird, the Seaflo just repeats what is on the first page where the Chinese one has the rest of the instructions



So yeah, if I go removing stickers then it because pretty hard to spot the difference unless you have two side by side.

Some more little tweaks on my suppressor box.

Added in cable entry port on the other sides now so I can route the cables out any of the sides.



Also added some channels for the cables to sit inside, they are the exact width of the cable so they fit in really snug.



This would be the cable pathing for a coming in the back going out the side, like I will be doing on my retail version. I designed it so none of the cables come close to each other and they are all held in by the cable channels and cutouts, plus everything will be heat shrinked.



Changed out to black bolts and printed 6 of them for the wind simulators that I am building at the moment.





These are them mounted on one of my retail wind simulators.



They tuck in between the PSU and the blowers, for the next batch I build I will space the blowers out a bit more so you can still have rotation with the suppressors in place.



Here are the 3 bolts for was suppressor box holding them on.



They are all M4 Nylock, with the exception of the power plug which is M5 Nylock.



In other news, I had so much fun testing on my mates oscilloscope that I brought my own. It is a 2 channel 100MHz 1GSa/s scope. I got a really good discount on it because it was an end of line clearance at my local electronics store. It was normally $1350NZD and I got it for $900NZD so I saved $450NZD.

Guys, might this be another good US option?

http://www.digikey.com/products/en?keywords=Fixed inductor 470uh 4.9a

Yup, they pretty much the same spec as my ones except they come in that little protective covering, looking at the dimensions it is physically quite a bit bigger than the ones I use because of that covering, but other than that they look good.

Installed the inductors and coil whine is a lot better even at 980Hz! How do I increase the frequency to 4 or 8kHz? Thanks!!

Hey guys.

I have finished my extensive testing and QA on these suppressor boxes.

I am totally happy with them and I am going to include them on all my wind simulators going forth.

Here are some photos from my testing.

This is the waveform with both blowers attached. The top waveform is blower A and the bottom one is blower B. You will see they are both perfect square waveforms that you would expect from a PWM signal. This is also tested using my old worn out Seaflo's that cause the stutter problem if connected without the suppressor box so even with them it can totally clean up the waveform.



To refresh your memory, this is what it looked like without the suppressor boxes on my original tests, that little half step is the back feed voltage from the induction of the blowers.



Temperatures are also great, in my first photo you can see in the bottom right corner that I am running at 8KHz and I am getting 28c with a 22c ambient temperature, so it is only running 6c above ambient and only about 2c hotter than the original design running at 980Hz



This was my test setup if anyone else wants to test these wind simulators with a scope. I was using one of my "Option 2" Wind simulators and my old worn out Seaflos



How these Monster Motos work is they keep the positive lead at 12v and switch the negative on and off with the PWM. So in the video example I inverted it so it would make a little more sense. You need to connect your ground lead up to the ground on your PSU then connect your probe in between the motor controllers and the suppressor box, on the clean side of the suppressor, on the wind simulators that I sell I have added quick connects there so I can connect up a splitter and connect my probes up while I am testing my wind simulators.



Set your trigger at anywhere around 6v and your volts per division at 5v per division and you should see a nice clean waveform like this when you turn the wind simulator on.



Here is a video demonstration of the suppressor boxes in action. In this video I will ramp the fans up from 0% to 100% then back down to 0% and you can see the square waveform is perfect all the way up to a solid constant 12v. also have a listen to how quiet they are at 1%, without the suppressor boxes they whine like anything at low PWM.



I will do another video with an A to B test with the suppressor box on one blower and just the blower on the other, I want to build up another test unit to do the next video because I don't want to do that test on a customers wind simulator.

Over the last couple of weeks I have now built 3 wind simulators using the new suppressor boxes and they all show the same awesome results so I am fully ready to roll this out to all of my wind simulators going forward as it makes them massively better.

Here are the 3 wind simulators with their suppressor boxes installed. There is one full complete "Option 1" an "Option 2" (Without the blowers) and an "Option 6" (Controller box and all the 3D printed parts), I sell a lot of different kit options depending on the end users DIY stills so I can keep the price down because shipping the full unit from New Zealand is really expensive.

I've been looking at the PWM code library trying to figure out how to change the frequency myself but I've run into a problem. The PWM library states that using a custom timer sacrifices of the UNO timers and hence one of the PWM pins. Can I run two fans using one timer? Should I be changing the PWM pin from an array to only 1 pin and will that work without any hardware pin bridging? Any guidance would be really appreciated. Thanks.

The iRacing app uses the following settings for their PWM speeds. It gives you the option of 980Hz, 4KHz, 8KHz and 31KHz (31KHz is too fast for the MM but it can work if you are connecting a small server fan directly to the Arduino)

Code:

// iRacingFanBoi fan control for Arduino Uno with fast PWM options


/******* CONFIGURABLE SETTINGS *****************************/

// minFanPWMDuty - sets minimum desired fan speed, adjustable to suit different fan characteristics
// increase this value if your fan is not spinning fast enough at low car speeds
int minFanPWMDuty = 15;   // value between 0 - 255

// maxFanPWMDuty - sets maximum fan speed, adjustable to suit different fan characteristics
// decrease this value a bit if you find that the fan doesn't increase any more past a certain PWM speed
int maxFanPWMDuty = 255;  // value between 0-255, it would usually be higher than minFanPWMDuty

// pwmMode - sets the PWM frequency, valid options as follows:
// pwmMode = 0 will use 980Hz PWM, default mode which will work with all fan types, will cause coil whine if using a MM.
// pwmMode = 1 will use 4kHz PWM, might reduce coil whine for blowers, use heatsinks on the MM - check MM temp at a low fan speed.
// pwmMode = 2 will use 8kHz PWM, might be OK for blowers with active cooling on the MM - check MM temp at a low fan speed.
// pwmMode = 3 will use 31kHz PWM, use with caution - not for blowers with MM as it will cause very high temps. Check MM temp at a low fan speed.
// server fans - should be able to use pwmMode = 2 or 3.  If you are using the PWM control on the server fan, leave this at default 0.
// if you have blowers with a monster moto, try pwmMode = 1 or 2 and check whether your monster moto temp at low speeds.
int pwmMode = 2;        // value of 0, 1, 2 or 3 - modes 2 and 3 will overheat a Monster Moto if used with blowers

// PWM duty when the fan is stopped, either 0 or 255 depending on the fan.  Some server fans have reverse PWM behaviour
int fanOffPWMDuty = 0;  // value should be 0 or 255.

/***********************************************************/


int pwmpin[2] = {5, 6}; // PWM input
int inApin[2] = {7, 4};  // INA: Clockwise input
int inBpin[2] = {8, 9}; // INB: Counter-clockwise input
int Speed = fanOffPWMDuty;
byte spd;

void setup()
{
   Serial.begin(9600);

   // initialize digital pins as outputs
   for (int i=0; i<2; i++)
   {
      pinMode(inApin[i], OUTPUT);
      pinMode(inBpin[i], OUTPUT);
      pinMode(pwmpin[i], OUTPUT);
      digitalWrite(inApin[i], LOW);
      digitalWrite(inBpin[i], LOW);
   }

   // disable timer0's interrupt handler - this will disable Arduino's time keeping functions such as delay()
   TIMSK0 &= B11111110;
  
   if (pwmMode == 1)
   {
      // Set pins 5 & 6 to Phase-correct PWM of 3.9 kHz (prescale factor of 8)
      TCCR0A = _BV(COM0A1) | _BV(COM0B1) | _BV(WGM00); // phase-correct PWM
      TCCR0B = _BV(CS01);  // prescaler of 8, gives frequency 61kHz/8/2 = 3.9kHz
   }
   else if (pwmMode == 2)
   {
      // Set pins 5 & 6 to Fast PWM of 7.8 kHz (prescale factor of 8)
      TCCR0A = _BV(COM0A1) | _BV(COM0B1) | _BV(WGM01) | _BV(WGM00); // fast PWM
      TCCR0B = _BV(CS01);  // prescaler of 8, gives frequency 61kHz/8 = 7.8kHz
   }
   else if (pwmMode == 3)
   {
      // Set pins 5 & 6 to Phase-correct PWM of 31.25 kHz (prescale factor of 1)
      TCCR0A = _BV(COM0A1) | _BV(COM0B1) | _BV(WGM00); // phase-correct PWM
      TCCR0B = _BV(CS00); // prescaler of 1, gives frequency 61kHz/1/2 = 31.25kHz
   }
   else
   {
      // Set pins 5 & 6 to Fast PWM of 980Hz (prescale factor of 64)
      TCCR0A = _BV(COM0A1) | _BV(COM0B1) | _BV(WGM01) | _BV(WGM00); // fast PWM
      TCCR0B = _BV(CS01) | _BV(CS00);  // prescaler of 64, gives frequency 61kHz/64 = 980Hz
   }
}

Thanks, looks like what I needed. I'll give it a shot.

What about using cheap hair dryer? This one on the video I found does not make whining noise and works up to 24v...


What do you think?

Mike