In the driving simulator community, setups can quickly grow ever more complicated and expensive, all in the quest for fidelity. For [CNCDan], rather than buy pedals off the shelf, he opted to build his own.
[Dan] has been using some commercial pedals alongside his own DIY steering wheel and the experience is rather lackluster in comparison. The build starts with some custom brackets. To save on cost, they are flat with tabs to let you know where to bend it in a vise. Additionally, rather than three sets of unique brackets, [Dan] made them all the same to save on cost. The clutch and throttle are a simple hall effect sensor with a spring to provide feedback. However, each bracket provides a set of spring mounting holes to adjust the curve. Change up the angle of the spring and you have a different curve. The brake pedal is different as rather than measure position, it measures force. A load cell is perfect for this. The HX711 load cell sensor board that [Dan] bought was only polling at 10hz. Lifting a pin from ground and bodging it to VDD puts the chip in 80hz, which is much more usable for a driving sim setup.
[Dan] also cleverly uses a 3d printed bushing without any walls as resistance for the pedal. Since the bushing is just the infill, the bushing stiffness is controlled by the infill percentage. Aluminum extrusion forms the base so [Dan] can adjust the exact pedal positions. To finish it off, a bog standard Arduino communicates to the PC as a game controller.
The project is on GitHub. Perhaps the next version will have active feedback, like this DIY pedal setup.
Bottom hinged pedals allow the foot to actuate the pedal in an arc similar to the one your ankle moves in.
Activating them from school bus driving seat height and too far away is cringe.
🤷🏼♂️ To each their own, ergonomics isn’t just a town in Sweden though.
Glad someone is trying to make these simulators more accessible, the prices on the commercially available ones are usually way out of line for what you get: some ABS shells and pedals with a 50¢ potentiometer.
neat project and i’ve read up a lot on them, what I do not understand is why most use of a load cell sensor over a magnetic encoder like the as5600 or the newer mt6701? I’m sure there is a simple reason please let me know if you know why.
Braking is about controlling force on the pedal not the pedal position hence the use of load cell.
A position sensor is suitable for the throttle, since that only needs to know the position of the accelerator pedal.
But brakes are more about the force on the pedal than the position of the pedal. A load cell can measure a response from gentle braking to the full strength of your leg pushing as hard as you can on the pedal. The difference in the position of the brake pedal between these extremes is only a matter of a few cm, but a huge difference in force.
The bushings are mixed and matched to provide the “feel” of a (real, hydraulic) brake pedal but transmit the braking force to the load cell.
Glad you asked, there is a simple reason.
Car brake pedals aren’t moving in a linear way, as brakes don’t work based on the movement, but the pressure that is put on the brakes that compresses the oil in the braking system, which these pedals are trying to copy in feel. You might not be able to measure the actual difference using a magnetic encoder at higher pressure. The force goes up exponentially based on force and the pedal movements are minimal at higher braking. And you would still need something to push against that can withstand high pressure. With just a magnetic encoder you would not be able to drive around a lap properly as it’s not feeling similar. Sure, it’s possible to make a super simple brake system with a magnetic encoder and a piece of rubber in the back, but it’s a lot more work, it will fail in the long run, the feeling of the pedal keeps changing as the rubber deteriorates and it will never feel properly. And even IF you can get it to work, it’s still a major issue as different vehicles feel different which is easier to adjust with a load cell. So yeah it’s cheap but unless being cheap is the main reason, you will never be happy with it.
Take a normal car and drive it around a track. Then get into an F1 car and before the corner, apply the same force on the brake pedal as you would with a normal car and you are going straight off the track as the brakes have barely touched the rotors. The average man can’t brake properly when put in an F1 car. Even experienced racers can’t. A big tough guy that goes to the gym a lot, can probably get it to brake 80% of it’s actual capacity. You need to train a lot to be able to handle the brakes. So to mimic it a bit, you want to put more load on the pedal to make it feel a tiny bit more F1.
If you look at the higher end pedals, for example the Heusinkveld Ultimate pedals, they even use hydraulics inside the brake pedal to mimic the feel of a car, next to a loadcell as the input. Those accept 140KG/308LBS of force on the brake pedal with a 200KG/440LBS load cell, which would snap a Logitech pedal kit in half.
Great design under your right foot but having to use the other foot to keep everything from sliding away is incomplete design. Attach the pedals to a large hinged in the middle piece of plywood to be able to sit chair on and have the pedals on the other end. Pluses for hanging the pedals pivots from the top instead of on the floor as others have commented, like most cars and trucks. Gas pedals used to be on the floor but rocks got stuck in the pivot causing big problems.
Next the pedals for an Helicopter Simulator. Please.
Nice setup but if I had to nitpick, the resistance of most clutch pedals isn’t linear. This might be by design so it’s easier to hold the clutch fully engaged while stopped in traffic.