Force feedback messages format

[baritonomarchetto]

Recently I had the opportunity to test Boomslangnz (and other authors) force feedback arcade plugin with my driving force GT and I must say that it impressed me. Very nice piece of code!
Now, I was wondering if the output messages from the software (which is supported by a massive number of FF wheels and is a sort of "standard" I suppose) could be directed to an arduino board to control bigger motors and feedback devices. So the question is: what's the format of messages FF wheels expect? Are they serial messages of some sort?
Thanks in advance!

[baritonomarchetto]

Anyone?
My primary goal would be to detect offroad and hit messages and translate them to a motor activation. This is why the standard (if any) format of such messages would be of great help.
Does "offroad" message has an ID of some sort? How many bytes is such a message made up of? What is the baud rate of such messages? 9600 eventually?
If this makes sense...

[arfink]

Recently I had the opportunity to test Boomslangnz (and other authors) force feedback arcade plugin with my driving force GT and I must say that it impressed me. Very nice piece of code!
Now, I was wondering if the output messages from the software (which is supported by a massive number of FF wheels and is a sort of "standard" I suppose) could be directed to an arduino board to control bigger motors and feedback devices. So the question is: what's the format of messages FF wheels expect? Are they serial messages of some sort?
Thanks in advance!

Look up the USB HID protocol definitions for force feedback game devices. It's arcane though.

[baritonomarchetto]

It really is. That's why I need a hint from people that have some experience with that
In my second post I tryed to be less generic just to increase the probability of an answer

[Boomslang]

I dont really understand sorry

However a clever guy made ffb plugin work on his arcade wheel with arduino. He messaged me recently, he wrote a custom made C# FFB software for arcade drive wheels using a modified vJoy driver and Arduino, meant to drive either directly an arcade motor driver (like Sega model 2/3 hardware), or a third party driver using PWM outputs, still using ffb plugin in between

I dont know much about that stuff myself

[Howard_Casto]

I looked into it and it's doable, but potentially difficult.  Like Boomslang said there are Arduino examples out there.... some of which let you build/hookup a wheel directly to the Arduino.  I've yet to find the ff structure/protocol expressly spelled out for the hardware end though.