start of the pain

Peter, it is perfectly fine to be this excited!
And let me tell you, you are not going to have your life back when you finish building....
You will constantly come up with ideas to make it better...

Just some recommendation:
For your frame you can consider using different materials to save on price and weight.
- Use aluminium for the most critical structures, where strength is very important. This is mostly the parts experiencing bending/twisting lateral forces.
- Use plastic PVC for the parts that experience lengthwise forces of pushing or pulling. Any material pipe is very strong in this direction.
- Use steel cables where there are pulling, extending forces on the frame. They are very light but extremely strong to pulling.

-Use good quality potentiometers. They will be much cheaper than hall sensors, but just as good.

hi frakk thanks for the rapid responce.

im confused now as you say pots are cheaper than hall sensors.
i found these at 0.79p each thats the same price as a newspaper. are they no good?
http://proto-pic.co.uk/products/Hall-Effect-Sensor.html

I was thinking of a complete sensor that looks like a potentiometer with magnets and signal conditioning already included.

The sensor you are showing is just a digital switch. It is either ON or OFF and you can't use it for position sensing.
Linear hall sensors are more expensive, and you still have a lot of work to do with them.
You will also run into serious trouble if the magnets are not set up properly.

Just make it easy and use a quality potentiometer.

Good on you for coming up with your own design! I too started by copying other peoples ideas, but in the end found different and better ways of doing things.

I would also advice using potentiometers rather than hall sensors. I started off using hall sensors and had a lot of difficulty mounting them with magnets in the simulator. I switched to potentiometers as they were easy to couple to the motor shaft and are just as sensitive. Only down side to pots is you have a moving part that can wear, but they are reasonably cheap and easy to replace.

cool ty guys pots it is

ok guys i have managed to order two slightly diferent sized sprokets.

as its a joyrider style sim the two axis are uncoupled so it wont matter but with one smaller than the other i will have one axis faster moving than the other.

so my question is for most realistic fealing am i better with faster bank or pitch axis

Faster bank!!! Its better to put the slow sproket on the Pitch as it requires more force to move up and down...

Good point, but if your motors can handle it I think that a faster pitch would be more realistic to simulate bumps in the road!

If you think about it, turning a car left and right can be much faster than accelerating/braking.

I would put the faster motor on the Roll axis, but that will greatly depend on the leverage and gearing of your structure.

Hi,

I'm intrested on how this project turned out.. have you got any recent pics Peter? also is the alu 10 or 16swg?

Thanks