MS Wireless Racing Wheel FF Hack (Interfacing Xbox360) WIP

[doctormord]

Hi everyone,

at first let me introduce myself. My name's Chris from Germany, i'm a teammember of modcontrol.com-staff since several years. Actually i'm studiing microsystemelectronics..

To make it short, i'd read a thread here in this forum which belonged (surprisingly) to an arcadecab-conversation with an xbox360 and the wireless racing wheel. As far as i know, there actually is no force-feedback-hack for this wheel.

I thought about doing this some month ago, using an 18v-power-driller-motor in the wheel. Beside the mechanical problem with the pinion there was also a big problem to spin the motor.

Hooked up the scope showed some nice pwm-stuff for the build-in controller. (45kHz 0-50% duty)

So what we have in there?

Signals:

Direction (L1): Low/High
Enable: PWM Low/High

What we need for a "standard" motor-controller?

Direction (L1/L2): Low/High x2
Enable: PWM Low/High

The (other) main-problem is the pulse-length for the motor to spin. The power-driller-motor needs longer pulses to spin up and produce torque. So stretching the Enable-PWM is needed.

All in all i actually ended up with an L6203 Full-Bridge-Motor-Driver, 5 Inverters and some capacitors/resistors to make things work.

Hooked up the whole thing to the new motor resulting in ~8amp stall-current at 18V, where ~39watts are "heated away" in the bridge (2x RDSon = 0.6ohms) and ~100watts puts power to the wheel.

Controller needs to be cooled, as well as the motor.

All in all, the L6203 solution is not the best, because of the high MOSFET-RDSon losses (IČR) and there's also no currentlimit at the moment...

But alot of fun!!

See some pictures attached, the first four shows circuit/wires, the next three shows simulation results for the pulse-stretcher.

[doctormord]

Continued here:

Attached are some scope-probes from the real circuit showing the pulse-stretch-signals. (Yellow original, Blue modified)

Settings:

Code: [Select]

Analog Ch  State   Scale    Position   Coupling  BW Limit  Invert
CH1        On      1.00V/   0.00uV     DC        Off       Off
CH2        On      2.00V/   -6.00V     DC        Off       Off

Analog Ch  Impedance   Probe
CH1        1M Ohm      1X
CH2        1M Ohm      1X

Time    Time Ref    Main Scale    Delay
Main    Center      5.000us/      298.6000us

Trigger  Source      Slope    Mode      Coupling     Level    Holdoff
Edge     CH1         Rising   Auto      DC            2.16V   500ns

Acquisition    Sampling    Memory Depth    Sample Rate
Normal         Realtime    Normal          50.00MSa
All in all it is possible to hock up any motor-driver to this circuit, which is using the "standard 4-quadrant-mode".

Hopefully this is somewhat helpful (and please excuse my english). I'll post some shematics when final circuit is avail.

For now, 2 videos showing the thing in action. One-hand-driving is not recommend..  






Cheers doc

[doctormord]

Hi all,

next step is the interface pcb with current-limit-chopper.

Cheers, doc.

[mikesnowdon]

Hi doctormod.

I joined this forum after finding this thread. Excellent work!

I'm looking at doing something simmilar and have a thread of my own on xbox-scene.com:

http://forums.xbox-scene.com/index.php?showtopic=743154&st=30

I'm interested to find out more about the way you did it. Also I would appreciate it if you could have a look at what I have worked out so far and let me know what you think.