”The first simulator was built for my father, who had retired from racing Dodge Vipers,” explains Berney Villers Jr, founder of SimXperience, a start-up company that sells both DIY simulator kits and fully assembled professional racing simulators. “I believe that he bugged me about it for about a year before I finally came up with the initial prototype.”
But what started as a labor of love for Dad has since turned into a business. Villers now makes the kits available to engineers and other technophiles willing to spend two grand and some DIY time on building the dynamic and interactive simulator. He has now launched his own business and joined SimXperience where he is instrumental in design, fabrication, and simulator testing.
For the last several years, SimXperience has been active in the X-Sim Cross-Simulator software community. After much consideration, Villers concluded that his simulators would be based on this software and that we would actively contribute to the development of X-Sim.
His decision was based on several factors, including the basics of how simulators function. He describes four main components:
1.) Software to extract physics data from simulation games.
2.) Software to translate incoming physics data in suitable instructions for actuators.
3.) Software that send instructions to the actuators.
Villers says steps 2-4 are achievable by most competent developers. “However, Step 1, obtaining these physics values from software that was not designed to share them, can be quite time consuming.”
The community-developed X-Sim software provides all four above mentioned components and even makes them available piecemeal, which helped Villers go forward with his business.
“In the last few years, I have observed the community-developed model beat all other simulator companies to market with support for new simulation games,” says Villers. “This is a trend that I expect to see continue, and a major reason, why I have chosen to design our simulators to be X-Sim software compatible. This also provides a substantial cost-benefit to our customers.”
The simulator’s controller is designed and specified by SimXperience and is slated to be produced in quantity for them by RMF Design and Manufacturing (Mississauga, ON). This controller is a step up from competing units in that it is capable up providing three actuators with 250 updates per second from a single USB connection. Additionally, it is programmable with serial numbers that allow us to ensure that our software is not being used on competing hardware.
Simulator actuators are supplied by Mirai Inter-Technologies Systems (Thornhill, ON). The actuators each have individual values for position, speed, and acceleration. Moves can be relative, absolute, force controlled, and more. All actuators run on 24VDC, so it’s easy to connect them to existing power supplies.
The SimXperience Commander software is enabled by a variety of new technologies that were recently released from Microsoft. From an architecture perspective, this software is designed to run on both 32-bit and 64-bit systems in native mode. This is an issue that all software vendors of timing critical software will have to solve because 32-bit emulation on a 64-bit PC is simply too slow for timing critical applications such as
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