Showroom 2DOF Pneumatic Piston Chair

My group of 3 mechanical engineering students are working on a DIY motion simulator using compressed air and pneumatic pistons for our senior design project. The chair includes 2 solenoid valves, 2 linear potentiometers, an arduino mega, and a serial to usb converter.


The above picture has an old joystick that was originally programmed to work with X-Plane using an arduino header file called ArdSim.h. We however converted the code to work with simtools instead. The Joystick has since been removed and replaced with a HOTUS and a camera threaded pole for the oculus rift sensor.


The above picture shows the electronics that we used originally when the simulator used ArdSim.h. Much has been removed and the arduino leonardo has been replaced with a serial to usb converter.


The two solenoids used to control the two pneumatic pistons.


The pneumatic piston used for pitch. The string above is attached to one of the linear potentiometers.

We developed a PID control law and are using the serial to usb converter to send data back to the PC. This data is then shown in the Arduino plotter so we can observe our desired vs actual roll and pitch.


We are also implementing an oculus rift headset with the chair.

The chair worked for about a week with Simtools 1.3 using DCS World, however an update to the game seems to have broken it. We also tested the oculus rift with DCS World and have observed that the framerate is not up to our expectation.

We are now switching to War Thunder and are hoping for a SimTools 2.0 DIY license from this post.

Interesting, good luck with the project.

Good idea to reuse one of the good old Rock'n Ride Chairs.

About the low frame rate when using the Oculus Rift: Did you make sure that your PC hardware is powerful enough? I am using an Oculus Rift with FSX as well as AeroFly, and the framerate is good.

We upgraded an old lab computer to hold an AMD FX-6350 and a GTX 1060 so other VR games work fine. The motherboard didn't have usb 3.0 so we had to buy an expansion card for that. Ended up having clearance issues between the GPU and the expansion card because the motherboard only had one PCIE 16X slot and one PCIE 1X slot. We cut part of the plastic shroud of the GPU and used a PCIE 1X extender. Mounted the expansion card upside down and got everything to fit.



We are now looking into AeroFly as we weren't aware that War Thunder didn't have an offline mode.

Thank you, will look into it.

Thank you to this forum for all the help over the 2016-2017 school year. Our project finally debuted to our school and was an amazing success!