Feel The Virtual Road With Force Feedback

When you’re driving your virtual supercar around the Italian countryside the last thing you want is an inauthentic steering wheel feel, that’s where Open FFBoard comes in. Racing game enthusiasts will go to impossible and sometimes incredibly expensive lengths to build extravagant simulators. [Yannick] feels many of these products are just a little too pricey without much need.

Right now his board is still in a process of iteration, though it can integrate with Assetto Corsa already. You can see in the demo video after the break that it responds quite realistically to the video game state, however problems keep cropping up in search of solutions. Motor drivers burn out and power resistors are added: that energy has to go somewhere. Next up will be switching to the increasingly popular Trinamic drivers. Either way we can’t wait to see the next revision and to get another amazing simulator build sent in to us, maybe centered around the Open FFBoard.

7 thoughts on “Feel The Virtual Road With Force Feedback

  1. Are they only finally getting it right? Steering wheels were in teh first gen of force feedback controllers, late 90s, and then it was all “Oh, you’re driving a Turbo Esprit, for realism, have some front wheel drive torque steer…”

  2. The version in the video is only the second prototype and had very low precision but worked as a concept.
    I am completely redesigning the project at the moment with a different motor driver and modular concept. You will later be able to use your own motor drivers with the FFB interface.
    The old version showed that the concept works and there was quite some interest in an open source usb ffb interface.
    Stay tuned and see how it works out once the next prototype is finished :)
    I am currently building a TMC4671 based motor driver which would allow the use of 2 and 3 Phase Motors and DC Motors with the same hardware.

  3. I’ve wanted to replace the electronics in my Logitech Formula Force ever since Logitech stopped supporting it because not enough memory and what not. Although i don’t really have any games for it. I’76 is the only game i’ve really used it with and there’s nothing like it. I’d really like a remake or another game very similar to it and have my formula force back in action. Too bad it’ll never happen.

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