DIY Compact 2DOF No-Weld

I'm using some small Dayton Audio Pucks.

I drilled out the correct size using a hole-saw, and then mounted them and covered them with some rubber shelf liner (see pics).

I've also used a scrap piece of carpet underlay on the bottom seat portion, just to give a bit of cushioning due to the seat being hard poly/plastic (we don't want hemorrhoids after all ).

The finished product has been working great so far.

Perhaps one day I'll upgrade to a nice fiberglass Recaro or Bride racing seat, but as it stands I haven't felt the need to.

Plus these poly seats are super lightweight, which is great for the motion rig as it causes less stress on the system.

Sorry, I forgot to mention, as you can see in the pic's the cover isn't baggy at all.

When I bought the poly seat, I ordered 2 of the covers, as I figured those would wear out first.

As it stands, I have zero wear on the first one, so unless I find a steal of a deal on a fiberglass racing seat I'm sticking with this setup.

Spent 4hrs in it tonight, and plan to go for around another 2 or 3 hours more.

Simply because this Assetto Corsa free "Sol" mod is incredible in VR and I can't stop playing it....aside from going for pee breaks, LOL!!!!!


My gawd I love VR + a DIY motion platform....thank you to the x-simulator mods + community...you ROCK!!!!!!!

Huh, very good to know that those covers are tight fitting. I might have to pick one up!

U R welcome

Out with the old, in with the new - new seat booster and ujoint interface bolted up, it's SO MUCH more solid than it was. I can really feel the movements now - but I think my pitch axis may be inverted.

Time to actually sit down and go through all my axis assignments and make sure everything is oriented correctly. Anyone know a good PCars2 track with hills and such for testing/tuning?

Yup, this is definitely where I'm headed. Thanks!

Been a few days since I've had a chance to mess around with things. It's mostly working pretty well, but I'm not really happy with the A1308 hall sensors in practice. The mechanical limitations (large shafts) combined with the magnets I have around give me extremely small functional measurement ranges - ~40 degrees in both directions from 'center' uses around 9% of the axis in SimTools, leading to some fairly gnarly deadzones in the motor rotation.

I'm going to take another stab at some rotational hall sensors and a radically different approach to mounting and measuring, as I have some ALS31300 and TLV493 3D hall sensors coming in for an unrelated project. They are i2c and 3.3V but some basic code on a 3.3V Pro Micro I have laying around should let me turn those readings into scaled output that looks just like a potentiometer to the main Uno R3.

It may take a few weeks to get those sensors and the associated PCBs in, though. More updates once I've had some time experimenting - or if that fails, I'll just get together some 10K pots.

I ended up ditching the idea of using the i2c/3v3 based 3D hall sensors - they really are just not right this kind of application, given that it runs at 5V and would need either an interpreter board and additional circuitry or a level shifter and some major code changes to SMC3, which I didn't really feel up for.

Given that, I ended up reworking the A1308 brackets to better utilize the KJMagnetics R424DIA magnets I started with. The specific part number I am using is 'A1308KUA-2-T'. The KUA is the micro SSIP package and the 2-T means it has 2.5mV per Gauss. This means if I put the face of the magnet about 4.5mm from the face of the A1308 package, I get way better response range. I'm using about 60% of the axis range in Simtools for one, and ~40% for the other. I'm not sure why the discrepancy in sensitivity, but given how much better it's working overall I'm not too arsed to chase it down at this point.

I think I'm getting pretty happy with my SMC3 settings:


And my SimTools settings:


I think I went a little heavier on the pitch/roll than most people I've seen - but to me, the pitch/roll is way way more noticeable than the surge and sway, because the latter are mostly short impulses where pitch and roll are sustained.

Dumb question though - do different games use different DIR flags in SimTools? It seems like Pitch and Surge especially in PCars2 and Dirt Rally are opposite?

Interestingly, both my PCars2 (the most recently updated UDP by value1) and Dirt Rally plugin (the updated one by value1) are showing almost the opposite as the SimTools manual, which may be what's throwing me off:

Nose pitched up - Pitch Right
Car pitched down - Pitch Left
Tilt right - Roll Right
Accel - Surge Left / Pitch Right
Decel - Surge Right / Pitch Left
Right turn - Roll Left + Sway left
Left turn - Roll Left + Sway Right

As mentioned by value1 in his DR1 plugin page, surge and sway seems busted in that particular game, but the rest of it seems to be working if somewhat counter to the manual.