Pc wheel on an xbox - working

[tboneuk]

Hi everyone, only just discovered this forum a couple of days ago, lots of information.

Here is a picture of a modded pc wheel for the xbox.

Originaly I was going to design an interface for the serial output of a pc wheel using microcontrollers but after reading a bit on various forums I decided on a much simpler system.

Basicaly rewired an existing pc wheel to work on an xbox controller. Very cheap about

[Generic Eric]

Sounds like a cool project.

Can you still use that wheel for you pc?  Is there a switch to switch between pc and xbox?  If so are they connected at the same time?  I assume its gotta be USB eh?  I guess that would answer the previous question.

Which make/model is the wheel?  Do you have a link to the manufacturers site?  Does the wheel have pedals or a shifter?


That picture is freakin' huge, can you resize it?

[tboneuk]

The wheel is made by Guillemot. This uses a single 100K pot for the steering but this also provides feedback to the I-Force board to center the wheel (there are no springs in this model just a very hefty motor), so I replaced it with a duel 100k pot. 1 gang for the feedback circuit and 1 gang for the xbox circuit. After playing around a while with an cheap microcon controller from madcatz I got the wheel to work with a reasonable about of deadzone but with enough range for full movement. Another 100k pot to calibrate the center of the wheel so it stayed straight.
Yes there are pedals and again by adding a 100k pot to one terminal of the accelerator pot I managed to get full range. The Gears are either side of the wheel and I used a simple dipswitch circuit to control which of the gears microswitches sent a signal to which button (ABXY) as each game is configured differently.
As the xbox has so many buttons it seemed more logical to take the control wires upto the actual wheel and mount the pad circuit board there rather than mount the pad board inside and wire extra buttons to the facia. This ment removing the original board (and adding 9 extra wires through the stem of the wheel itself) but as I only use the pc for music production now I'm not bothered about using it for games. I did keep all the original wiring so it can be put back to it's original state but the reasearch and development to make a usb controll an xbox via a microcontroller seemed a bit excesive compared to

[tboneuk]

Here is a picture of the original wheel.

It is sold by thrustmaster

url http://europe.thrustmaster.com/products/d_prd.php?p=T66&fam=4

[Dave_K.]

Wow, very cool project (looks good with the xbox pad mounted in the middle).  Nice job!  I am curious about the dipswitch circuit you use for switching gears...maybe you can share more info on how you did that?  

[tboneuk]

Well the easiest way is with a diagram, I will post it latter.

But for now I shall try to verbalise it

The dip switches are single pole devices but arranged in sets of 4 or 8 at a time, so connect 4 pins on the one side together and then connect one of the buttons on the wheel ( for example Gear Up) to that.
On the other side you now have 4 seperate outputs that connect to each of the ABX and Y butons on the pad. Do the same for each of the wheel buttons so you get 4 sets of A, 4 sets of B etc. All A outputs together, all B outputs together, same for x , same for Y.
Therefore by selecting one the four butons on the first dipswitch you can redirect Gear Up to A or B or X or Y, do the same for any other buttons needed.

This was a quick and dirty solution to a probelm of remapping the pad buutons to the wheel micro-switches, Idealy it would be done with pic micro-controller and bi-lateral switches (these work like relays but are solid state therefore no real current is consumed by the circuit). Using this idea a preset set of switch combinations can be held in the chip and recalled from say 2 switches (up and down until you get the correct configuration). There are some great devices on the market available for this called picaxe, they can be programmed from silmpe basic and cost about

[tboneuk]

A picture is worth a thosand words.

[Beley]

......I plan to include a form of force feedback by interfacing the xbox yellow wire (controls the small motors for vibration) to the I-Force board......

The yellow wire (assuming you are talking about the yellow wire in the controller cable) is not acually used for force feedback, its acuall part of the video signal (vsync if i remember correctly) and is used only for lightguns as far as i know,  you could probably still wire something up by taping into the vibration outputs on the controller itself

[tboneuk]

Thanks Beley, you may have saved me from looking for a signal that isn't there.
I've been doing some reshearch into force feedback systems, the site that has any white papers on I-Force appear to be down so i'm thinking I have two options.

1) provide a pulse to the feedback circuit on the pot (I-force corrects this to center the wheel), by pulsing the voltage on the feedback both positivly and negitivly the correction should shake the wheel as it will think it's off-center and try to correct. An sawtooth oscilator circuit should do this but I will have to experment.

2) Redesign a feedback circuit thus bypassing the i-force circuit alltogether, concentrating on keeping a wheel centered then adding the vibration part after.

The first is desirable, but the second could be acomplished fairly eaisly and would give more control. I'm not sure if the vibration motors have just on and off states when controlled from the xbox or there is some anologue quality to them. If there is, diiferent forces of 'shaking' would be very nice to implement.

[tboneuk]

After some more research I have found that there are variations in vibration. So I will look into the viability of getting rid of the i-force boards alltogether and designing an all in one wheel centering/shaking circuit.

This does mean that the wheel will be used strictly for the xbox, but I got rid of any of the decent games for pc so I could buy new xbox games anyway.

[eightbit]

This is really cool but where is the advantage? Why not just use a xbox wheel? Why hack the PC wheel?

[shmokes]

This is a bit O/T, but since Xbox uses USB ports to plug the controllers in and you can get adapters are there any PC wheels that will just work in an Xbox?  I have a Logitech MOMO wheel that I am in love with and I just got an Xbox for christmas (can't wait to MOD it, waiting for the Xecuter 3).  Could I just plug the Logitech wheel in and have it work?  Is there any way to add drivers (after it's been modded even)?  

[tboneuk]

Ok Fair point eightbit, but as yet IMHO I do not think the xbox wheels are built or perform as well as the pc wheels. I had the unused pc wheel so in my situation I felt it would be worth it. I'm sure it would not be worth converting a new wheel (the cost of the thrustmaster wheel was about

[isamu]

theoneuk.....

First of all, I sincerely hope you are still visiting these forums. Because I want to tell you, you the FIRST person I have seen ANYWHERE that has taken this idea and actually done something about. I am extremely impressed by what you've been able to accomplish with your Guillomet PC wheel and the Xbox.

This is something I have been waiting to hear someone do for a long time. Now onto my questions....

1)Being that this thread is nearly six months old, I'd like to ask where you are with this project?

2)Have you managed to accomplish getting the wheel to deliver the auto-centering and self vibration effects with Xbox games?

3)Have you tried modifying any other PC wheels yet?

4)What are chances you could make a Happ controls FF wheel work with the Xbox?

*Happ  Steering Wheel*

Immersion seems to have an interface that allows it to work on PCs...

*Immersion Interface*

Awaiting your response

[isamu]

bump 4  theoneuk

[isamu]

excellent idea tbopne pm me..

[isamu]

 theoneuk is it still working yet?

[Ghoward]

That was a nice wheel until you changed it to work with your Xbox. Its not like Xbox wheels cost that much to buy in the first place. But each to their own I guess

Gary

[isamu]

That was a nice wheel until you changed it to work with your Xbox. Its not like Xbox wheels cost that much to buy in the first place. But each to their own I guess

Gary

what do you mean?

[Ghoward]

That was a nice wheel until you changed it to work with your Xbox. Its not like Xbox wheels cost that much to buy in the first place. But each to their own I guess

Gary

what do you mean?

It doesn't look right, I'm sorry but that was a nice PC wheel.

If people think that sticking a Xbox pad on a PC wheel looks good that

[isamu]

Gary what do you mean?

[isamu]

Bump for tboneuk. I wonder where he is.

[Redseven80]

That was a nice wheel until you changed it to work with your Xbox. Its not like Xbox wheels cost that much to buy in the first place. But each to their own I guess

Gary

what do you mean?

It doesn't look right, I'm sorry but that was a nice PC wheel.

If people think that sticking a Xbox pad on a PC wheel looks good that

[koolitop]

hi tiboneuk, hi all

i'm french,sorry for the language,,

i read your topic, really cool
and i do your mod on my thrustmaster racing wheel!!

for my xbox

[KeithD]

YOu could hack any wheel that uses a pot for position to work on the XBox by simply doing a controller hack.

Open the controller, remove the little thumb joysticks from the PC board and wire up your steering wheel pot to it. From what I get out of tboneuk's post, that is pretty much all he did. Looks to me like the XBox controller mounted to the wheel is just so that he could use the buttons.

This method would work on any game system that has joysticks for steering and pedals on the controller. In fact, it even works on my PC through a roundabout method where I am using Dpad Pro, PSX controllers and an ancient PC wheel.

K