Many arcade machines can be emulated and handily controlled with the standard joystick and button combos. However, a few don’t feel quite right without some extra equipment, motorcycle racing games being one of them. So, no longer content to go to an arcade to get his fix, [The Q] welded his own motorcycle simulation rig for playing racing games at home.
After an initial design was sketched out, rectangular tube steel was cut to size and welded together with a MIG welder. A central shaft linked to some secured bearings made the central pivot point. A few pistons offered the resistance needed for leaning into the curves. To the central shaft, a seat and an old bicycle fork were attached. A clever linkage from the handlebars to the base causes the bike to tilt when turning the handlebars and vice versa.
The bike was ready for prime time after some grinding, orange paint, a license plate, and some lights and grips. [The Q] just needed to get the angle of the bike into the simulation of their choice. While we expected a teensy or other microcontroller emulating a controller, [The Q] went for a somewhat simpler approach, and 3D printed a cradle to hold a PlayStation controller. Little levers pull strings to articulate the joystick, and a cable from the throttle grip pulls back the trigger on the controller. All in all, the experience looks pretty decent, particularly when you’re comparing it to a motocross arcade machine. What it really needs are some fans blowing for the effect of the air stream coming at you.
If you’re thinking about busting out the MIG to make a rig of your own, maybe consider making a homemade car racing rig to complement the bike.
Awesome project. Be careful because in real life motorcycle stearing is opposite.
Thanks…now I don’t need to say it.
I whoever build this rig ever rod a motor bike, the frame, handle, all looks like a rod or MT bike.
Rod? Rode? Road? I whoever…
The problem I’ve noticed with all motorbike simulators is that they never feel like riding a motorbike.
At speed, on a real bike you don’t steer the way you want to go, you actually push the bars the wrong way to push the bike down in to the corner. If you haven’t noticed this, go out and try it on a straight road.
As I was watching the video I was thinking the same thing. The game needs to provide the force to tilt the bike rather than the tilting bike controling the game
It’s astonishing how quickly the brain corrects for the “backward” steering input without ever understanding what’s actually happening. There is no shortage of long-time riders who simply will not believe they are turning the front wheel to the left in order initiate a turn to the right.
Of course it’s more complicated than just reversing the steering axis if you want to simulate it.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Countersteering#How_it_works
The problem with the simulation of motorbike racing is that the physics of cornering and balancing a motorbike are different to a car. You actually bring the bike in an unbalanced position to corner the bike, otherwise you can’t compete with the centrifugal forces. This is something which is hard to simulate.
Nevertheless, the approach of this project is quite nice by decoupling the steering and the lean angle in opposite to arcade game motorbike Sims.
I’ve never ridden a motorcycle, but do I do the same when I ride a bicycle? I know when I’m riding slow and making big turns I turn the handlebars in the direction of the turn, but I’m also making small corrections that I can’t consciously explain.
Pretty sure this happens on regular bicycle too (at speed) – very slight turn to left sends you right and vice versa. I thought it was due to caster effect, rather than gyroscopic influences?
There was this motorbike simulator for 486 kind of riding in a room, cannot remember the name, would be neat to see how such a bike fares in the game
I have literally zero experience with mechanical design, but I’m curious about the whole process. We see the guy just sketching some design, he builds it, and voila – it works just perfect. I have trouble believing that he would get all the dimensions right, the linkages, the pneumatic pistons to work together just right on the first try.
Should we just silently assume that he spent some weeks iterating on this, and here he’s just making a second copy of the final iteration? (and the previous steps were just considered to be too boring to include in the video).
Or maybe with enough experience you can just guess it mostly right on the first attempt?
Or… He just cut the video cleverly. Ask Mr. Okham, the barber, about which answer to pick.
The end result is interesting and it’s some great engineering and fabrication work, but the video is not really worth watching. I get that there are people out there who just _love_ spending 30 minutes watching someone tighten bolts but it’s not for me. I’d rather hear the creator talk about the design choices, challenges that sprang up during fabrication, what they would do differently next time, etc.
Now that I’m thinking of it, this reminds me of those confusingly popular cake decorating videos where all you see is a person’s hands decorating a cake. This is like the maker version of that.
It’s called CAD and simulation.
Does anyone else move this slowly and delicately when making things at home, or is it just a YouTube thing?
Just stand straight up, hold both arms straight out in front of your chest, lean upper body to the right/left watch how the right/left arm(s) move. It is basically a slow motion of what really happens. I always found myself pulling while pushing in high speed corners.
If you want to see the ONLY motorcycle simulator on YouTube check out the channel Sling Town. Using the Nintendo Wii I’m able to do full first person POV races with full simulation. I lean, I accelerate, I brake and I compete hard in full simulated races with the commercially available MotoGP for the Wii. The whole system (everything including the Wii) costs about $100. If you put something stupid like this in your front room you will just continue scaring away women forever. Be nice to your psyche and your pocketbook and buy a Wii.
If you want to make a motorcycle simulator then don’t put the rear brake in place of the clutch lever
Any bicycle, regardless of how it is propelled, is incapable of generating lateral (cornering forces) when upright, it has to lean towards the centre of the desired turn. (There is no such thing as “centrifugal force”, the cornering force has to be towards the centre of the turn (centripetal), as the mass of the bike has to be accelerated toward the centre of the turn (Newton’s first law of motion). Just because centrifugal force is a widely used and accepted term , don’t make it right!. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Centrifugal_force
When a bike is travelling upright, to generate a force to comer left say, the bike has to lean to the left. Any physical object can be regarded as rotating about its centre of gravity, so to make the top of the bike lean to the left, the bottom of the bike has to go right, to make this happen, a tiny steering input to the right is initially required to start the lean to the left.
The only time the steering on a bike is used in its “obvious sense is when moving at very low speed.
Counter steering has nothing to do with gyroscopic effects, which will resist any change in the plane of rotation of any rotating object. Motorcycle wheels are large and heavy so the gyroscopic effects are very important. Its has the effect of limiting the rate of rotation of a bike about its longitudinal axis, and smoothes such rotation out ,as seen (beautifully) in flip flop corners one after another.
How a bike works seems very simple, but is anything but, the best book about this I know of is “Motorcycling handling and chassis design” by Tony Foale.
What makes a motorbike Sim rig difficult is that you “drive” a car, you “ride” a bike, so any realistic Sim has to do more than take inputs from some hand operated controllers, the knees are involved as well.
I have a motorbike, 5 bikes, 4 cars and a car racing licence so this is not theoretical BS. I have a very good car Sim and would love a bike Sim, but its going to be difficult and hence much more costly than a car Sim.
I agree with bob, the basic idea is ok, but this bloke never rode a motorbike, you change gears with your left foot, rear brake is the right foot, left lever is clutch, right lever is front brake, there is no symmetry in the controls.
For a pure gamer who doesnt ride a motorbike, this would work, it woudl complelety do my head in!
Gotta wonder if I could 3d print a race bike copy to get a more realistic ride. then add sensors for f and r brakes, clutch, throttle, transmission speed etc.
I know you can buy a race bike + track simulator for about $10,000 and up but that’s too much for me
I found a few 3d bike files that I suppose you can slice and print at a larger scale.