Another 6DOF worm gear project

I have been researching, reading, watching videos on anything and everything DIY motion sims over the last couple of months.
I am taking the plunge and building a 6DOF platform using a lot of ideas from @SilentChill and his first project. I have SimTools sorted out and have been playing around and testing on the bench. I’ve been lurking around on here learning from all of you in this awesome group. So thank you to everyone and thank you for the future questions I’m sure I will have.
Here is a list of what I have so far and some pictures of where I am at.

- 3 Arduino UNO’s
- 12 IBT-2 drivers (two per motor)
- 5 / 750w power supplies
- 6 1:25 ratio power wheelchair drives
- 1 powered USB hub
- 6 12v 80mm fans for the drivers (one per pair)
- 6 / 6127V1A180L.5FS Hall Pots
- lots of wood
And random other supplies.

I am flying by the seat of my pants on this (see what I did there?) and using no maths.
I’m sure things will get changed along the way. Things are looking ok for now as you can see in the pictures. More to come...

A little more progress today. Motor mounts made and attached. Now I can fab up the rest of the frame to get the motors to the correct height. I seriously doubt the 3.0 amps on the motor decal. Probably more like 30 amps! Lol! I still need to make the actuator arms.
Also finished the last of the Hall effect pot mounts. Hopefully tonight after the kids go to bed I can get at least some of the motors mounted and the hall pots fitted into the mounts. See pictures below.
More to come.

I suggest you make the lever arms with several holes so you can reduce the force if need be

180w is not weak but it is not that powerful

a heave assist may help you out with a spring pulling each lever up - consider an 'L' shaped lever arm

google 'bell crank'

Thanks @Gadget999! I did do some testing on these and suspect they are much higher wattage than 180. I was easily able to lift 60 lbs with a 6” CTC arm. That should be about 30 ft/lbs or around 40 NM. Never-the-less I do plan on adding 3 gas springs to the rig to help with the load. And yes I will make holes every 1” along the arm to be able to fine tune things. I want to have the option of long travel if possible.

The bell-crank idea is a neat one as well.
Thank you for the ideas!

A little more progress today. Motors modified for the hall pot drives. Motors mounted to the base. And hall pots mounted to the motors. Hopefully tomorrow I can get the arms completed and mounted. I’m still waiting on the remainder of my IBT-2 drivers. Hopefully they show up soon so I’m not stalled while I have this momentum...
More to come.

Actuator arms are made and installed. I know the length is a little bit of wishful thinking. But with gas springs installed I’m hoping to use a large portion of that arm length. Started laying out the electronics yesterday. Currently making Arduino cases on the 3D printer and designing some cooling cases for the IBT-2’s. I also added some “high precision” kid guards to protect my hall pots and brackets.
More to come.

Looking nice already. That 3A current on decal seems strange, 3A @ 24V is only 72 watts. 40Nm @ 43rpm makes 180W, of course there had to be more torque if weight lifted easily with 90 degree lever angle. And rpm is unknown so this is pure speculation.

What kind of gas springs are you planning to use? Those used in for example car trunk lids are meant for one stroke every now and then, they heat up pretty much if used continuously.

Thanks @Agosky! I really appreciate that. I just plan to use simple gas springs from a car trunk lid or something similar for now. I will be mainly using this as a flight sim so movements will be slower and less repetitive. But I’m hoping it fits the bill for now. I won’t know what lengths I need until I get my seat frame made. And I won’t make that until I get it all wired up, and tested. Thanks again!

So I've had one Arduino connected to 1 IBT-2 and driven the actuator through SimTools during testing. All went well with some troubleshooting/learning. I am now preparing to connect all three Arduinos to my powered USB hub and have a couple of questions as I am not programmer and not very familiar with Arduino programming.

- Do you connect and upload the SMC3 sketch into the Arduino's individually, or can I do that to each one individually through the hub?
- I assume I need to label the Arduinos to keep them organized for which motors they are going to control?

Thanks in advance!

you need to set up each arduino individually - SMC3 Utils needs to be run on each one to set pid etc

Thank you!
I will give it a go tonight.

Been printing like mad the last couple of days. Doesn’t look like much progress but I’m proud of my motor driver cooler mounts. I’m hoping to get by with one driver for each motor but I will have enough to run two each if needed. still printing Arduino cases and more driver mount coolers. Also started on the power busses. More to come.

A small amount of wiring today. And I was at least able to get one Arduino and two actuators working. So it was nice to see some movement!

Nice work man, looks like she's coming along nicely!

T

Thank you! Making some good progress today as well. I’ll share more updates tonight.

Second motor driver mount is installed and wired. Played around in SimTools engine to start getting my bearings on how to achieve the different DOF. I’m waiting on the last driver cooler mount to print so I can get the last of the wiring done. I’m excited about that!! In the meantime I started laying out my upper frame and seat. Lots of measuring! More to come.

I'm hoping I'm missing something simple here. I have Xplane 11 up and running, the plugin installed in the plugin updater, and patched. I have followed all of @John458 tutorial for setup. But I am only getting 3 inputs from the game showing in Tuning Center. (See picture below) Roll, Pitch, and one direction of Yaw. Now I have my Roll and Pitch set up for Extra2 and Extra1 as per the tutorial. What am I missing? All of my Axis assignments work properly manually testing them.

I figured it out. I did not have Setting #135 checked in the Xplane Data Output settings.
Its working now.

congratulations for your ingenious work!
if I can leave you some advice on cooling the bts.
dismantle the heat sink, insert some heat-conducting paste and break it up, taking care to perhaps replace those bad screws with others that allow you to tighten the heat sink well.
BTS has a very bad heat exchange as it left the factory, in this way, thanks to your excellent airflow system, you should always be very thermally efficient under stress.
Marco

in edit: also pay close attention and take care of the power connections on the bts terminals.
good job / fun

@MarcoMade thank you! I will add thermal paste to the heat sinks for better heat transfer. I appreciate the feedback. Cheers!