Resolved 3DOF Flight Simulator with Sabertooth & Kangaroo final build

Hello to everyone on the forum, I have finally got round to completing my simulator since my last post in 2018 I have since completely redesigned my simulator.

The reason this has taken me so long is that I am in the military and on average I have six-month deployments within the RAF, and since January I have had more time on my hands to finish the sim.

And before I could finish the sim I needed to design and build a multi display control panel that would be integral to the sim, in essence this is an aircraft in flight control panel, and I needed to know the weight of the panel when incorporating it into the simulator, when balancing the sim, the weight turned out to be 11.Kg.

I used Trimble Sketchup and AutoCAD to design the simulator from the ground up and to see that every part would fit down to the millimetre. I took inspiration for my design from the DOF Reality simulator, this is a good basic design, so I modified the approach to suite my design.

The steel in the frame is entirely 25 x 25. mm & 50 x 25 mm for the heavier load sections, and 60 x 40 mm for the central beam that the seat sits on.

A lot of the mechanical parts where manufactured by myself on a Lathe & CNC milling machine most of the brackets on the sim I had laser cut.

A lot of the parts on my simulator have been 3D printed, by having this resource has proved to be invaluable in the final construction of the sim.

On the electronics side I am using 3 motors, on the rear I am using a Motion Dynamics Worm Drive Motor 12V 200W, 180 RPM, 20Nm Torque with a MCP4-60:1 gearbox, with a JRK 12-12 and a custom 3D control box attached to motor, this is for the Yaw movement.

For the front I am using two 24V 400-Watt worm drive motors, these are driven by a Sabertooth controller & Kangaroo controller.


I have also incorporated a closed loop limit switch control at the maximum motor arm positions as a safety feature.

This system involves using hall sensors at the maximum motor arm positions to tell the Kangaroo controller the relative position of the arm this signal is then sent to an Arduino to convert the signal to one that the Kangaroo can understand, as the Kangaroo cant process hall signal data for limit switches.

In the coming days I will ask for help from the forum in setting up the Kangaroo and SimTools as I am very close to the final setup. I have enclosed some pictures with his post.

If you would like to see more pm me.