This project was a weekend project that I took on. I used to professionally reverse engineer cars for building self-driving research vehicles for companies.
Here's a demo of it using a VR headset that I made shortly after the blog post: https://youtu.be/jfWcgWdSK28
To answer the other questions, I made it work directly with PCs as a USB accessory. It doesn't require the Xbox gamepad in that variant.
I never bothered building out the FFB for the steering wheel - but it would be a nice addition. That said, slightly jacking the nose of the car up gave enough resistance on the wheels but it was still easy enough to turn.
It's still been a great tool for me to get seat time. Recently, I just taught at Spa-Francorchamps in Belgium and the Nürburgring in Germany. I used this sim rig setup to get properly acquainted with the tracks before teaching in person.
Last, along with a production company in NY, we used the same technology in a big rig truck to make it into a super realistic truck simulator for Pilot Logistics. I think there's media on it floating around the internet somewhere.
Cheers and happy to answer any questions!
- In all such comparisons, people conveniently leave out build and research time/costs. I suspect that at least a few hundred hours went into this project, which would significantly increase the cost, if we account for hourly rates. Whenever I've run the numbers on similar custom hardware projects, I've come to the conclusion that if I'd simply worked the hours as overtime, I would be getting a much better product even if I bought high-end equipment, and quite a bit cheaper. So, these are strictly for people who enjoy the journey, and as such I find such comparisons insanely misleading.
- What exactly are the wheels doing, when you're turning the steering wheel? Is the car stationary in the garage, or is it lifted? I probably wouldn't want to spend dozens of hours turning my car's wheels in a stationary position, it puts strain on things.
- While on face value it seems like this should be about as real as you can get with sim equipment, I'd argue that it's actually fairly low- to mid-tier. Neither the steering nor the brake pedal will have any adaptive feedback, which is fairly easily obtainable with direct drive wheels and in some high-end pedals.
So all in all, quite a cool project, but not particularly useful or reasonable, IMHO.
He blew his engine, at a raceway. Something tells me that gently steering back and forth on his garage's polished concrete floor isn't something he is concerned about.
I think this is probably the biggest disadvantage compared to using an actual sim wheel. In the linked video demo it looks like the driver is struggling to apply the right amount of steering and correcting after the corners. At times the game footage looks more like someone playing with a gamepad than a wheel.
Re. driving feedback from the controls, near the end of the post:
> Next Steps:
> Force feedback support using the electric power steering and the ABS module.
I recall playing COD4 online (on PC) and someone had hooked up a controller with rapid-fire and was pwning the noobs, quite literally.
PS. COD4 is apparently set in 2011 - do players not have automatic weapons anyway?
[1] https://www.heise.de/en/news/Car-hacking-real-cars-turned-in...
In which a very limited edition version of Ridge Racer in arcades used a full-size Mazda MX-5 (technically the Eunos Roadster) shell and panoramic projection.