While he’s waiting for some of the big players like SimXperience to release their much anticipated Accuforce wheel, Phillip Jansen van Rensburg is leading a DIY (Do It Yourself) project on how to build your own direct drive / servo motor force feedback wheel for the PC. If you’re not handy, a DIY type person and have never taken on a project like this, you should wait for something like the Accuforce.
Instead of trying to explain things to you all, I figure you could go check it out for yourself. There’s two threads that he’s created. One here at Overclockers, “Australias Busiest Hardware Forums” and you can get to it HERE. Or if you’re an iRacing member, you can access his thread HERE to join in on the conversation and maybe try your hand at a serious DIY project too.
Based on what I’ve read, it’s about $1000 US to make it happen. Do you have what it takes or would you prefer to wait for something like the Accuforce ? Me personally, I’d be scared to tackle this project and would prefer to just buy one that’s ready to go. Kudos to him for going for it though and sharing it with all of us !
Check out these two videos of the wheel in action ! Can you see how much torque is coming from that wheel ?!? Man, you need to be in good shape to handle something like that.
[vimeo width=”640″ height=”480″]http://vimeo.com/111744407[/vimeo]
Here’s another video of him taking the Lotus 78 out on the iRacing skid pad. Watch when he lets go of the wheel !
[vimeo width=”640″ height=”480″]http://vimeo.com/111744408[/vimeo]
Surely impressive. Just wondering how realistic THIS kind of force really is. Seems a lot stronger than what one would get driving the real deal, no?
This is Supposed to be “The Best Type of a Wheel Base” there is. From all the comments in the forums and all. The Price’s are from very costly to “Out of this World” for a Direct Drive Wheel Base. I don’t think I could drive with all the FFb they have or able to produce in these driving Sim’s. I like to watch people drive with them on Boobtube and see how strong some people use with them. It’s crazy really.
Like this, right? https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=1YbtD9H1q38
It depends on the car. They have measured torques of over 20 Nm steady from the steering racks of open-wheel racing cars without power steering, so for something like that this would be completely realistic. The drivers don’t train for nothing, it’s hard damn work driving those things. =)
And it’s not even the maximum power that’s the best part about these things. You’ve gotta think about it in the same way as one thinks about PSUs etc. You’re not just looking for the maximum power, you also want to have ample headroom. Think of it this way: A T500 at max power feels like a fairly hefty steering wheel, but it’s still not as heavy as many RL cars I’ve driven. Now, if normal steering input, just going around a corner hard is enough to max out the T500 and feel “right”; what if I hit a bump or something? The wheel can do no more, it’s already maxed out. With a G25 many people end up running their wheels completely saturated, always getting 100% force at their hands just to make the wheel feel decently heavy, and they lose all information.
With a wheel like this you could set the gain of the FFB to like 20-30% to replicate the level of a T500, but you’d have the wide open headroom to properly replicate all the harder jolts as well that can happen during driving. You could have much much more useful information about what the car is doing without having to set the wheel to be overly hard.
That’s the real draw of these things, they don’t get choked out by just normal driving like even the CSW V2 does. =)
it is in line with reality. Book yourself on a track day with any single seater formula car, and have a go. Even in something as tame as that, the force is massively greater than any non-direct drive wheels out there. Watch an onboard of any gp2 car and you can see just how much force is running through the wheel. F1 cars are a bit easier due to the power steering.
Because we don’t have gforce we are utterly reliant on FFB to give us information when driving in these sims, so it is even more crucial to have the same level of force as reality, even more so as theres no ‘bum’ feel or inner ear balance to rely on.
These are cool to look at, but too expensive and sorta dangerous. My T500rs will break fingers and I run it as low as possible on ffb. Any higher on PS3 and it is too hard to turn fast enough to avoid hitting walls and other drivers.
Meh, I run a T500 at 72% (any more and it doesn’t get more power and just starts saturating), and it really isn’t that strong, I can easily hold it steady with one hand when it’s pushing at max power. I’d say that T500 is the bare acceptable minimum, using something like a G25/G27 at this point I need to hold it gently with my fingertips to prevent drowning all the force out.
I don’t know how things are in PS3 world, but on the PC the wheel should move very freely even when using high FFB settings. The only reason I can see why it’d be too hard would be that you’re A) clipping it by having bad FFB settings, or B) using too much damper setting (generally you don’t need any damper on the wheel, a good game should have a realistic amount of damping in the pure FFB signal). In fact the strongest wheels available (CSW, CSW v2, T500, as well as SimSteering and their ilk) also tend to be the most freely moving and fluid wheels. Stuff like DFGT etc. on the other hand can’t cope with quick direction changes at all and really slow you down.
Meh…
72% ??? ROFLMAO!!!
I’d laugh as well if I was talking about almost any other wheel, but the way the T500 is set up is that going to 100% doesn’t give you any stronger maximum FFB, it just makes the wheel itself clip (kinda like adjusting a G25 to 125%). Based on the benchmarks I’ve ran it through and testing with weights attached to the rim, I found that on my T500 at least 72% already gives the maximum power, anything higher than that doesn’t make it any stronger, just more saturated. Basically, for the T500 (well they vary a bit but I’m talking about mine), 72% should be treated as 100%, 100% should be treated as ~130-140%.
So now you are calling out the engineers and designers at Thrustmaster. All while hiding behind a gibberish screen name.
How is that calling them out? It’s not like its a design flaw (many people like using it like that because they want the wheel to be as heavy as it can be most of the time), and they’re not doing anything that Logitech and Fanatec wheels aren’t doing, just assigning different values to it. Logitech and Fanatec slider numbering just happens to go beyond 100% whereas Thrustmaster stops at 100%, but they all achieve the same thing: They begin saturating the signal before you reach the maximum value in the slider, so if you don’t want saturation you don’t go to the maximum value on the slider. This is largely why the wheel defaults to 60%, why Darin of ISR also runs the wheel at less than 100%, and why the vast majority of FFB guides for the T500 tells you to run it at 60-70%, it’s just how the wheel was built. It’s not a flaw, just a thing it does. If you wish I can record benchmark data for it with WheelCheck.exe and link the results?
And it is indeed a great wheel, and I love mine to bits, but it’s not a super powerful wheel, for my tastes it’s a nice weight for a hefty racing car when it’s at full power but of course if it’s at full power during normal cornering it has nowhere left to go if anything else happens, so I’d still definitely like it to be capable of even more power. I’d want to set it so that it normally replicates the weight it has currently, but has headroom left to handle the extra signals that might be sent at it.
Also since when was having a username on the internet a bad thing? =)
Sounds like you are calling them out to me. Hiding behind a gibberish name gives TROLLS like you courage. You didn’t actually think I would waste my time reading your gibberish, did you? Bye TROLL.
Well, alright then, guess you’re entitled to your opinion. I think it’s a bit unfair to call me a troll like that, but meh, it’s the internet. Don’t get me wrong, I love the T500, and the only odd thing is that instead of labeling the FFB slider for example 0-150% like Fanatec and Logitech did they just kept it at 0-100% and made ~60-70% the default point. Nothing wrong with that really, as long as you know about it.
Just trolls.
To be fair to Jubuttib, you’re just a troll who isn’t afraid of showing their real name. 🙂
So anyone that does not agree with you and your two accounts is a troll? Right. What would you call someone that has all the answers to all the questions, even when no question is asked and scrolls thru every single story to tell everyone why they are wrong for having an opinion? Sounds like a troll to me.
so, all you’ve done is called him names, and said that everything he is written is ‘gibberish’, twice. You’ve not actually directly responded to him in any way, you haven’t said specifically what is wrong with anything he’s said. All you’ve done is repeatedly called him troll, and said he is writing gibberish, and referred to his screen name as some how being wrong?
think you’ll find you’re the one acting like a troll. well done.
I might have bought into all that gibberish had you not referred to clipping as saturating… in multiple posts here. Run it at 100% and turn down overall FFB effects in the software if you’re experiencing Clipping. You are loosing resolution on a Thrustmaster wheel running it less. Accuracy is better than over all strength. Which is all you have managed to do if you are in fact running it less than 100% in the TM control panel.
You can do that, but you’d have to set the in-game forces so that most of the time you’re going nowhere near signal in-game.
I usually refer to the in-game FFB clipping as “clipping” (this is what the clipping meters in iRacing and AC show) and the wheel responding with same/similar output to a varying input signal as “saturation” (this can’t be shown by the game) to try and separate the two different issues. Might not be totally correct terminology but I try. If you’ve got better suggestions for the terms I should be using, please do tell me. Always looking to improve. 🙂
What I’m talking about with saturation is this:
https://farm8.staticflickr.com/7544/15657108718_4229998e12_b.jpg
That graph is the result of running my T500 through the WheelCheck benchmark program found on the iRacing forums with 60%, 80% and 100% overall FFB setting in Thrustmaster control panel. The specific test is Log2 (Linear force test), which sends the wheel an FFB signal going from 0-100% at 2% steps (so 51 different signals total) for a set amount of time and records how far the wheel moved. With FFB set to 100% in the Thrustmaster settings the wheel started to produce pretty flat results with a ~60% FFB signal. 60% and 80% overall FFB settings suffer from this as well, but it happens later, extending the usable range. I did a few runs, and overall FFB setting of 80% consistently provided equally high peak values to overall FFB setting of 100%, and higher than 60%.
This already suggests that there’s no use running the wheel at higher than 80% at least, max power doesn’t change and you just get the same results with a lower FFB signal (saturation). I tested further with a program called Fedit (you can do arbitrary FFB signals with it) and varying weights tied to my wheel (water bottles), and found that on my wheel an overall FFB setting of ~72% already gave the same max power as 80% did.
I don’t expect I’ll convince anyone by saying this, but I still felt like putting it out there. Everyone is free to do whatever they want with their FFB, it’s not a 100% exact science and varies from game to game after all.