XBOX 360 - Adding Rev Lights and Gear Selector to MS Wheel?

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Matt Somers
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XBOX 360 - Adding Rev Lights and Gear Selector to MS Wheel?

Post by Matt Somers » Thu Aug 25, 2011 8:30 am

Hi

Back in the day I used to mod chip playstations and until recently hadn't really seen the need to take anything apart. However in preperation for the upcoming release of F1 2011 from Codemasters I decided to purchase the Official Microsoft Steering wheel (Which has been discontinued for some time). However being a bit of a Formula One nut and seeing this offering from FANATEC:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SgnxlWXs_CY

I started hankering after this and plan on building a replica F1 wheel to fit to my MS base. This however is not the problem I can work out how to do all of the wiring etc for myself.

What interests me more is the rev indicator and gear shift selector thats shown on the wheel. I know that Fanatec can make this rim compatible for the Xbox but are falling short of doing so at the moment (Licensing is always the issue with xbox stuff I believe) Does anyone know how or where this information would be drawn from to create the effect and if so how it would be possible to recreate?

Thanks in Advance

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RDC
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Re: XBOX 360 - Adding Rev Lights and Gear Selector to MS Wheel?

Post by RDC » Sun Sep 11, 2011 1:05 am

The M$ wheel already has Paddle shifters on it, anything past that is just mechanical and electrical work. The difficulty of it depends on how authentic you're wanting it or what kind of setup you're going for. Making a slap shifter is simple, as it's pretty much just a couple of buttons and technically works the same as the Paddle shifters do. Then a clutch is relatively easy enough, it's just a pedal that doesn't let the shifter buttons work unless it's pressed first, but going any farther than that, like making a 6 speed shifter for example, gets many times more difficult. That would require some coding and such, because the game isn't going to know what gear you want to be in or if you skip any, like go from 1st to 3rd, or 5th to 1st, so without some kind of PIC or AVR in there to do the math and then output the correct number of shifts to the controller it just wouldn't work. That kind of 6 speed shifter setup is really not worth getting into as the game really needs to be setup to use it, just too many issues that can crop up, and making it bulletproof in one game would most likely screw up how it worked in some other one, but it's all in the realm of doable.

The 'rev indicator' can't be a true indicator without some type of signal from the game being played as well, like how Force Feedback works. What you'd have to do there is wire it up to the Accelerator, so it's more of a 'pedal position meter' instead of an actual rev indicator. That can be done with a PIC or AVR and having the pedal's POT wired to an Analog input, then some coding to just turn on 'x' number of outputs to light up the LEDs depending on the voltage it reads. So the harder the pedal is pressed, the more LEDs light up. It's not a real rev indicator, but about as close as you can get.


There is also a blog going on about another F1 type 360 wheel conversion here. - http://xboxwheeldevelopment.blogspot.com/" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;
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Morrolan
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Re: XBOX 360 - Adding Rev Lights and Gear Selector to MS Wheel?

Post by Morrolan » Wed Sep 21, 2011 9:47 am

Hi,

I'm the electronics guy behind http://xboxwheeldevelopment.blogspot.com/ and revs are one consideration I've had for v2, which hopefully should follow on fairly quickly after V1 is proven to work on Friday! V2 also has a 16x2 character LCD as we're considering making the wheel easily-reprogrammable without having to plug it back into a computer.

As there is no feedback regarding revs from the game, you have 2 options - accelerator positioning as mentioned above, or audio monitoring through an electret microphone and an op-amp to enable a standard analog-capable microcontroller to monitor the input.

http://www.sparkfun.com/products/9964 Would do the job nicely when coupled with almost any electronics platform. Once you have set the start point and end point (i.e. highest and lowest frequency) in your code, the rev counter would be quite accurate if the acceleration curve was fairly linear, which in F1 would give a good enough representation to make it useful.

Regards,
Morrolan

mikesnowdon
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Re: XBOX 360 - Adding Rev Lights and Gear Selector to MS Wheel?

Post by mikesnowdon » Fri Jun 29, 2012 4:04 pm

Hi all.

Found this thread while googling for info on custom 360 F1 wheels. I have seen the blog made by the user above and contacted him about it but not had a reply yet. Morrolan, is this project still ongoing as I see no updates for a few months?

I would love to know if you have made the RPM and gear indicator work.

I found a faulty MS Wireless racing wheel on eBay recently for a very cheap price (pedals dont work) so I'm planning fixing it then some modding.

Would be great to hear back from any guys who have done anything like this or have any ideas on it.

Thanks.

mikesnowdon
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Re: XBOX 360 - Adding Rev Lights and Gear Selector to MS Wheel?

Post by mikesnowdon » Sun Jul 01, 2012 1:06 pm

Anyone heard from Morrolan?

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