[IN PROGRESS] 2DOF Wheel chair-driven Motion sim with Oculus Rift

I spent the entire day building the frame for my sim as I couldnt wait to start on it as I'm waiting for my H-bridge and Arduino to come in the mail Here are some pictures with some notes attached to them! No sketches were made before we started the build, but we had a decent idea of what we wanted to do. The motors are from a Jazzy 1122 wheelchair that we found that was going to be thrown out, so we salvaged it a few years back and found an awesome use for it now!


The motors name are specifically Pride e660. I couldn't find any info on them except that they are 24v.

Here are the base frame with one of the moros attached ( Sorry that i havent got any fotos before we attached them)

Only one was attached at the time of this picture as we test-fitted them, and then prepared them for mounting of the pot-meters afterwards.
Heres the seat that we wanted to mount on the base frame, its an old racing seat that my brother had before he got a new one for his racecar.

Heres the entire frame, with the seat mounted and the wheel/pedal module attached, we wanted it seperate as it would save space in an already cramped up room if we wanted to store it away. Only the seat moves.

Hopefuly there will be more pictures in the following week when i get my arduino and h-bridge, untill that, i still got some welding and stuff to do to make this frame perfect!

The steering wheel does not move much with a single long tube?
Hoping to see your progress

Thanks! And at the moment after some testing by moving the seat around by hand it doesnt seem as it shakes that much, but if it becomes a problem we will probably reinforce it. We're also working on making the steering wheels height adjustable, as it is right now connected to the pedal-base that can be moved front to back

Update on the sim! We assembled the entire chair sunday after painting it, and after smoothing out some edges and stuff like that. Here are some pictures:
I'm really happy about the frame so far, and we mounted some wheels to the base for easy moving around Some brakes will be added later.

I finally got my arduino in the mail today with my h-bridge, which i chose before reading about some peoples experience with it (it was the cheapest 24v 10amp h-bridge i could find for like 20 bucks or so) and well as fine it looks...

It couldnt even handle a 3 amp load from a small battery that we found while testing it it began to smoke after 5 minutes of playing around with the arduino, and suddenly it sparked and now it looks like this:

Please do not buy these cheap h-bridges! I just ordered 2x pololu 28v 20 amp motor drivers which should do the trick nicely, although they were a bit pricey The arduino works perfectly though, and its nice to have that in my hands after a few years without one, they're so neat! The h bridges will hopefully arrive friday, and I'll update the thread when(if!) it works

First test of the sim after a weekend of tweaking the settings, the pololu g2 h bridges worked flawlessy, and runs the sims for hours while they only get a bit lukewarm!

Nice

what sort of rpm / power are your wheelchair motors ? - they look like a good solution to me !

Specs on the Jazzy motor's are located in Miltons thread, titled "CXC Replica" These motor's aren't 100% ideal but that can be found for Cheap cheap and they have a VERY VERY robust gear setup as seen here.

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Thanks for the link - that was a good read, a very nice build

Again, I had no specs on them, but after some very rough calculations they had about 100 rpm or so at 24v (calculated from some brochure i found about the wheelchair online)

At 255 pwm and about 21 amps and 24v it can throw me around like i was light as a feather, and they measure about 40 degrees celcius(the pololu h bridges) when i measure how hot they become, and thats without any heatsinks.

I just shorted my one h bridge because of some careless wiring, so I'm about to rewire the whole machine and everything so it becomes perfect, some pictures will follow in the next week!

Those motors look much more suitable than a wiper motor

i will try and find a suitable pair of them

These motor's are 2-3X the size of a wiper motor.

Jazzy 1122 AKA Pride Mobility chairs are more of a US brand than anything,...not likely to find these exact units on your side of the pond....Tho anything possible i guess.

good news - i have found a pair of 24v wheelchair motors for a fair price

hope to pick them up tomorrow

I got my wheelchair motors today - images attached

Awesome, now pop that case open and see what cha got....you'll want to remove that Free wheel lever anyways. Also refer to my thread for Pot/feedback mounting. the Main shaft's in these are not hardened (at least mine weren't)

Whoops this isn't your thread. Lets take this over to your thread shall we @Gadget999

Looking good! Will be awesome to see your progress, I am really happy with my motors, especially after having tweaked the settings the last week Uploading some pics and a video in a few minutes!

After having been through the trouble with wires everywhere we took the whole week and tried to make it all neat and fancy, with an emergency switch, a battery gauge and mounting everything on some aluminum incluing the h-bridges so it all acts as a huge heatsink.
Heres a great pic of everything from above, this is also after the whole rebuild where we wanted to have the pedals and wheel moving as well, so it wasnt just a seat mover.
A nice little pic of the potmeters and how we mounted them the wires used are just an old ethernet cable, looks good compared to our first soldered solution that looked like shit

1 pololu 24v21 g2 h bridges that couldnt withstand touching an earthed motor while running, pft, what a load of cheap crap our mistake, the other one survived, even tho it was straight in this ones flames, it looked black, but we dusted it off, ordered two new ones (might wanna do a traction loss later on, so now we have the h bridge) and now we take wiring very seriously

Second test of the motion sim, after adding the pedals and wheel to the movement, so much nicer, and the h-bridges barely get lukewarm

The clicking noise is a relay that we added, so the motors had a physical brake. They are wheelchair motors, so they are freewheeling when not moving, so to avoid the "shaking" it had trying to get into its position, we ordered a 5 dollar relay on ebay and added that, works like a charm!

Other than that a plexi-glass box was added to the electronics to protect them, and some wiring was done

nice sim build. great you are enjoying it now.
some thing i noticed in the video. you must have sway the wrong way. sim must move opposite as you get in a turn. https://www.xsimulator.net/community/faq/which-way-to-set-simtool-axis-movements.230/ or are you not using sway at all.