The History of Direct Drive in the Sim Racing World (1/3)

One of the things that characterize motor racing and simulation fans apart from other sports is the pursuit of likelihood rather than entertainment, and that’s because the reality of motor racing is one of the most exciting and difficult to participate in.

At the beginning of 2015 I was going through a time of heartache on a professional level. Few responsibilities and expectations on me, due to a corporate restructuring, left me enough time to think about simulation, what I expected from it and how I could improve my own experience. The iRacing forums (the old ones and not that thing now) were buzzing with ideas especially in the Hardware section, from scented candles with track smell to fans that speeding according to the telemetry. At that time there was a talk of a very interesting development using industrial motors, and that’s because Logitech, 10 years after the launch of the G25, did not seem to suffer in their sales enough with belt steering wheels. Many people demanded something more and no commercial brand was willing to provide it.

A few years earlier, Frex, a Japanese brand that was difficult to access, was the only one that had tried to make something better and more expensive, but it didn’t even present itself as a viable option. There was room for innovation and a few took it upon themselves to lead the way through tortuous and unexpected paths. What could be done to improve driving sensations? How could greater strength, durability and immediacy be achieved?

Interestingly there were more appliances at home that were using or had in the past used belt drives, the most reliable solution in the simulation in the decade 2005-2015. One of the most common ones we all have at home are washing machines. These appliances had also begun to evolve and get rid of those cumbersome and annoying motors with moving parts that did nothing but break down over time. The solution they had found for more than a decade was the Direct Drive motors, which allowed them to perform the same function without friction, with much more revolutions and being much more powerful.

What does a washing machine have to do with a car steering wheel? Well, at first glance nothing, but on closer inspection perhaps some similarity can be found. For us the FFB that we get our hands on simulating the steering column is nothing more than the change of direction of rotation in that axis with its corresponding speed and force, exactly the same as happens in the real car, where the column remains fixed but the steering moves to each side according to the contact of the tires with surface. The Direct Drive motor allowed this to be done relatively easily, so with a programmable controller it could be used to receive the information and transmit it to the user much more immediately than going through a complex belt mechanism.

That was the solution that was already marked, without reinventing the wheel and using something that already existed in many different forms. There was only one small stumbling block on the way, finding a hardware that was not closed and could be programmed, something very difficult in an industrial landscape where each brand was very jealous of its technology and its motors.

Over the last few years, the implementation of free software at the enterprise level has become increasingly institutionalized. Practically 90% of the software we use is free or runs on free systems. Your telephone, the pages you read, the games you play online, etc. Almost everything runs on free software, and it has been proven that if a project is useful, it ends up working, first based on the participation of the community, and then thanks to the huge amounts of money and hours that the companies that adopt it put in from their own pockets. Finland has this paradigm well instilled in its universities thanks to the Linux case in 1990, and perhaps it has had something to do with the next step in our story.

Granite Devices (hereinafter GD) was born in Tampere (Finland) in 2006, by the hand of Tero Kontkanen when he saw the lack of flexibility of existing motor controllers on the market. Together with more people in the same problem, they seek to develop and manufacture Direct Drive controllers and motors, and for this they could not think of a better way to distinguish themselves from the rest than making their controllers “Open source” allowing anyone to program them from the same firmware. After years of hard work, the first example and key component of the great-great-grandfather of the OpenSimWheel (term given by Bernhard Berger to the developments under this premise) is the Argon controller whose appearance dates back to 2013.

With all the elements on the drawing board, all that is needed is to bring them together under the umbrella of some very talented people who work with these motors and controllers in industrial environments and who see how it could help them in their simulation hobby. The first to take a step is electronics engineer Leo Bodnar at Silverstone. Bodnar already has a working Direct Drive system in early 2014 that he sells for just over €3,000. Internally no more is known and it is not distributed how it works, so nothing can be done other than checkout. What is clear is that it uses a German-made AKM Kollmorgen servo motor, like most of those tested at the time.

Also at the end of that 2013 the Accuforce from SimXperience is released, which takes the route of using a stepper motor instead of a servo. This motor has different characteristics and is cheaper than servos, so in certain packs, in following years, it becomes the only alternative under 1000 euros/dollars. In 2016 would arrive a new version that has not had more continuity for the moment.

Back to the end of 2013 and with Argon already available, the fruits begin to be seen among users in German forums where the first schematics appear to interconnect the controller to a motor and an interface to the PC (the board that allows to recognize the device connected by USB). It is not a difficult assembly for a beginner in electronics but the amount of all the parts and motors used in conjunction with Argon easily exceeds 2500 euros. It comes to almost what a Leo Bodnar is worth, but the difference is that there is the possibility of using a small Chinese motor from a factory called MiGE much cheaper and with enough power. This is more than enough for some people to jump into the aboard and start testing it since there is a firmware and software that allows to replicate what Bodnar has, but available to everyone.

In these months this small revolution is magnified in the iRacing forums where appears (or rather reappears as it comes from the German forums) a Australian based user who works in the CNC industry and whose nickname is Beano. This tireless hobbyist and connoisseur of servos and controllers seeks to lower the costs of assembly with what he has learned from his years of experience in the business. He knows GD and knows that they are working on a new controller designed for 3D printing that could be used to lower the total cost, but first he needs to see what Argon does and what results it offers. He gets to work and in a few weeks he builds a working prototype following what the Germans have already published. This is crucial to fine-tune the Ioni development that GD is carrying out in 2014 and the first months of 2015.

To be continued in part 2 in a few days with the launch of Ioni, what it entailed and what it led to afterwards.

Part 2: The History of Direct Drive in the Sim Racing World (2/3)

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