Compact 2DOF Seatmover (Sabertooth)

Hello all! I am finally getting around to starting my build thread for my 2DOF motion sim. I've always loved racing games and since the N64's Top Gear Rally, we've had a racing wheel and pedals. My brother and I went in together on a Fanatec CSR wheel and pedals/shifter to play on Forza 4 many years ago and it has held up very well. We built a "rig" to play Forza in - the picture below. My uncle broke the H pattern CSR shifter so I upgraded to the clubsport shifter and once I bought an Oculus Rift, I purchased Project Cars 2 and started to research motion sims.



My sim is going to be a compact 2DOF seat mover platform controlled by an arduino and sabertooth 2x32.

Parts:

• Arduino Uno (genuine)
• Sabertooth 2x32 (genuine)
• PGsaw 50:1 motors
• 180 deg hall effect sensors
• 12 volt batteries (for the time being)

I will hopefully be making decent progress in the next two weeks and hope to have something functional before the start of 2019!

Thanks for reading,
Brandon

EDIT: (7 OCT 2020) As of now, I changed the rig to a platform mover

So it turns out that you can't get much done when you have a puppy recovering from neuter surgery and you also go out of town for Christmas and New Years! That aside, I've made some progress on the build. I am currently using a U joint off Amazon that I secured with bolts. I am either going to have to add a panhard rod or rethink my attachment scheme.




I started working on the electronics side preparing the arduino and sabertooth. I was having trouble getting the computer to detect the sabertooth with the DEscribe program until I ran across a post in a thread (help I do not know what to do Arduino + sabertooth) by @auryza. I grabbed a different cable and it worked like a charm! It turns out the microUSB cable I was using wasn't high enough quality. I probably won't get much more done tonight but I hope to have something moving by the end of the weekend.

I was able to get everything wired up tonight and got the motors moving in SMC3. I am a little confused about that though because the motors wouldn't turn when in Monitor out mode but it would in other modes.



Now I am waiting for my SimTools key for the next step!

Okay, I understand what the Out Mode does now. Verified I am getting feedback from my motor 1 pot but I'm not getting the same feedback for the motor 2 pot.

Motor 1 snip:


Motor 2 snip:


Do I have an issue with the motor 2 pot? This is what I'm leaning toward. If so, I'll troubleshoot in the morning.

swap the 2 outer wires going to pot2 or swap the 2 wires to motor.
Only do 1, either motor or pot not both.

Thanks for the advice. I broke out the multimeter and it ended up being a bad wire. All fixed and onto refining the motion!

Got a little further this evening. I was able to get movement in Project Cars2 after a few struggles. Now that I get movement in the game, I'm having a tough time keeping the motors in the SMC3 bounds. I've been trying to search how to tone the movements down but have yet to find anything that helps. If anyone has had the same problem and have a fix, let me know!

I need to read more about how to optimize my settings in the SMC3Util and I believe that should fix my problem. I haven't found a baseline to start off of but I'll keep looking. If I don't find one, then it looks like I'll be playing with it until I figure it out.

I did see the pot scaling in the SMC3-SPS sketch but I'm not sure how to adjust the scaling with AN5.

Came down with the flu so I wasn't able to do much today but I did fine tune some settings in SMC3 based off of the screen cap in @BlazinH's SMC3-SPS thread. I also turned on the pot scaling and dialed it back 50% non-linearly.

I was able to test pCars2 with my Rift and it's a super weird but very awesome sensation. I don't have my steering wheel mounted yet as I was just setting it in my lap for now but I hope to make a stand for it tomorrow if I'm feeling better. After that, I will take a video and post it! I still have some refining to do on the motion profiles but I would say this has been a success! I appreciate the forum's help and wealth of knowledge.

Been out of the game for a year+ but with the MS2020 hype, I got back into X-Plane and wanted to get my sim back working. I changed out the pivot point so there was no yaw but I'm now having an issue that I can't figure out how to fix. A search did not dig anything up so I made a video of the issue.

I'll test the motors in SMC3 and it will work perfectly and then when I open up SimTools, the left motor goes crazy. The wiring is all correct and solid - has anyone come across something like this?

Interface settings:

did you add capacitors to your analog inputs to arduino?

if you look at 4:30, he talks about noise suppression caps for each input


i also use arduino and saber tooth.
i used USB shield cables to connect my hall sensors to the arduino..

After reading lots of different SMC threads, I found @Sam Neall 's thread about his issues and then re-reading @BlazinH 's SPS thread, I pinned 8 to GND and changed the baud in SimTools and that fixed the motor issue.

Now I have a different issue - using the Output Testing page in SimTools, the same motor seems to not move using the slider until I get to about 60% and then it jerks to that position. It seems to be working fine in SMC3 Util so I'm not sure what this new problem is about. Off to do more research...

I noticed you and the person in the video are using 2x60 Sabertooth, I'm using a 2x32 - I didn't think it was necessary to use caps? I should probably change my wires to shielded but I wouldn't think it is causing my new problem as I don't have power wires near the Arduino.

I saw that thread and I haven't updated to 2004 yet. I had the DOFs in the assignments not at 100%, that helped but using the sliders, it's still twitchy and the motors aren't moving at the same time.

Below is what both motors look like in SMC3, which I think is acceptable?



I guess I will try tuning the DOFs starting with surge in pCars tomorrow.

I had Kd at 0 before and it was nearly an identical sine wave. I tried to find what the wave should look like but I could not find any posts with screenshots of a "good" tuning. I have read your layperson PID thread and my sim seems like it reacts perfectly in SMC3 but I don't know what "perfect" is either.

I've done those steps in the guide multiple times, each time it has come out to look like this:

Made some more adjustments in SMC3 and brought the Kp value down to under 100. I got rid of most of the jumping in the motors but I'm now trying to figure out another issue.

I can use the SimTools output testing sliders and when I slide to the right for the most part, it is very smooth ON THE RIGHT MOTOR. The left side doesn't move. When I slide to the left, the LEFT motor moves properly but the right doesn't. I'll get a video of this and post it.

I am using 2 12v AGM batteries in parallel - I'm wondering if I need to do some interference testing. I will search how to start that to try to pinpoint the problem.