Leo Bodnar releasing a Wheel

[Abdul Al-Amry]

Faints.....gets up and faints again.

Also this looks similar

Here is what Leo said on iRacing forums

This is the business end of my humble test system at home. I think we can finally have this on the market this year.
Bummer, I hate hijacking threads, Sorry!

Save your pennies ladies n gents.

 

[Brian Clancy]

That depends how much kidneys and lungs go for these days.

LOL! Depends who's they are I guess:tongue:

 

[Niels_at_home]

More seriously, the way I understand it (its Leo's product after all, so I just say what I know!) is its not for sale to home users. This might change if you read Leo's post at iracing (quoted in this tread) but I'm not sure if / when. Currently the system is used by some racing teams and other more professional (read expensive) simulators. It costs more than $2000 and remember that's just the parts, no wheel at all included! Hence its not really a G25 replacement..

 

[Brian Clancy]

Thx for the heads up Niels

 

[Abdul Al-Amry]

LOL! Depends who's they are I guess:tongue:

Mine aint gonna fetch alot thats for sure, with smoking n all. But I'll try to stop shaking to increase my chances.

@£500 ballpark I think it will be a great start.

 

[isamu]

I just discovered this thread and want to thank Niels for those impressions. That wheel looks absolutely superb. Can't wait until we get more information on it. Niels you lucky bas....:tongue:

 

[getsupercharged]

I don't want to say too much, but yes the Stock Car video was with Leo's product. It is not a 'wheel' as its not currently a wheel package, just the motor and parts.

Thanks for showing us this! If this is, in fact motor and parts...will this then be available in different "kit" forms? I ask because I typically fabricate my own "steering columns" and then bolt a Logitech or Fanatec FFB unit on the bottom with a Grant wheel on the business end (with an SLI-Pro of course!) and I am always looking for a stronger FFB unit to use. This looks like it fits the bill perfectly!

 

[Optimumflow]

Looks like an industrial servo motor to me, something along the lines of one of these:

http://gicl.cs.drexel.edu/wiki/Industrial_Servo_Motor_-_Ben_Rimai

Built in encoders and the like, sweet.

If that's the case and it's a stepper or an ac motor the electronics will be fairly complex unless a generic motor driver is being used. Even then it would have to be a reversing servo driver with good control. Controlling an AC or stepper motor is a far more complex task than the control of a simple DC unit. Then you have to add the very complex USB component...

These motors are REALLY expensive!!

If it was a simple dc motor pretty much any existing FFB wheel could be modified to accept one by upgrading the H bridge and adding a high performance PSU (such as a decent unit robbed from a PC). Then finding some way of interfacing the encoder or utilizing the existing item from original set up. This is the hackers approach though and I'm sure results could vary considerably.

Also Leo has constructed this, which I'm sure many are waiting to get their hands on:

http://www.lbodnar.dsl.pipex.com/ForceFeedbackController.html

Doesn't look like it could power that beast though, and it's clearly simple DC?

Then again whether this is AC or DC it's a huge motor and no doubt capable of doing some serious damage to your fingers. :tongue:

Very simple, very nice. (runs off to find a big DC motor...)

Cheers

 

[Stef Bord]

Peak torque 395 Nm !!!

You will turn with the wheel with this motor...

Sure Niels and Leo use AC brushless motor, but for sure 30 Nm motor is more than enough to break your arm... :wink:

 

[Optimumflow]

Yes not the specific one I listed. lol

They have a whole range of much smaller units: ftp://www.parkermotion.com/bbs/MPP/MPP_Motor_Catalog_10-09-06.pdf

It's the fact he's mounted the wheel directly to the motor that should light the bulb in many peoples heads. You will need a bigger motor/PSU and use much more power but loose all the noise issues, unwanted tolerances and delay associated with a geared system.

 

[Stef Bord]

Sure...

To compare, the Happ motor has 0.35Nm and the ECCI motor, 0.57Nm...

For the Happ the result is maximum torque 3Nm on the wheel with 24 VDC. I will test with 48 VDC...

Niels said the force of his wheel is 7* a G25 torque, so certainly 10-12Nm max...

 

[Alexander Rhodes]

He's releasing an FFB controller? Oh hell yeah!!! I can't wait to get one

 

[Heinz Vanderhoydonck]

Sli pro

Hello guy's.
Did enyone had recently contact with Leo?
I sended my sli pro's back for repair but they are more than 2 month's ago sended to him and after that i had no more contact with him. Mailed him several times but no respons.

 

[Will Currington]

Hello guy's.
Did enyone had recently contact with Leo?
I sended my sli pro's back for repair but they are more than 2 month's ago sended to him and after that i had no more contact with him. Mailed him several times but no respons.

I've emailed him about a dodgy encoder and that my SLI-M doesn't always show up until I unlpug then re plug it in, which it never did before. Haven't heard from him about either.

This is Leo's only downside, he is terrible at replying to emails.

 

[Optimumflow]

Check this post written by Leo :wink:

Hi Ian,

Brilliant project! Very well done!

I have just finished working on a custom project for a racing simulator steering wheel. Even though it's only one axis (unlike yours) the design challenge was to get 25Nm of peak torque (which is about 30kg force on a wheel rim.) At such high forces the torque control resolution had to be high otherwise you would feel steps or grittiness at low forces. I have used 15bit torque control and it works great.

I have used 3kW AC servomotor with custom controller and 3rd party servo amp. I am prototyping my own FFB controller/servo amp combo designed to drive up to 70V/30A AC servomotors. The firmware supports X-Y axes as in joystick but I had only one servo amp onboard. It complies with standard Windows FFB joystick interface but has 50MIPS DSP onboard so one can literally run the full dynamic forces calculation inside the innermost control loop (2-5kHz.)

It would be interesting to produce an engineering samples run of a dozen X-Y FFB controllers and see what people like you can do with them.

 

[Den.]

So. If he brings out a new product. Is there any hope he will improve his current "Customer Service"?

 

[Alexander Rhodes]

hmm

 

[Jim C]

Hi Guys,

Very interesting! Just what what we need, a wheel with some real force-feedback.

Leo seems is using one of these Kollmorgen brushless servo motors. Must be some sort of driver attached too.

I wonder how the wheel position information is sent back to the computer? Presumably there is some sort of of resolver or encoder internally in the servo motor.

This does seem like a much better solution than all the belts and gears of other wheel solutions -- providing much better resistance too -- which is what interests me as a race-craft training aid.

I'd be very interested to hear all the ins-and-outs of this vs. a more standard consumer design if you would care to tell us more Leo?

Jim

 

[Heinz Vanderhoydonck]

I agree with Den, Leo does a splendid job developing stuff for us simracers, but if you sell some products you expect some customer service. Or at least some info about why it take so long to repair something. I need to go out of the country for 5 month's and i would appreciate it to have my gear back before i go. So i hope he reads this message.

 

[Alexander Rhodes]

Heinz, I don't think Leo uses this forum, I've never seen a post from him on here, so I doubt he will read your message here. try EK's forum, he's normally about on there.

 

[Heinz Vanderhoydonck]

Finally had contact, package is on the way.