This is a DIY project I’ve been cooking for quite some time now. It’s a brake vibration system for the Logitech G25/G27 (or any pedal, in fact) similar to what is used in the Fanatec CSP pedal, using only an Arduino board and a ghetto vibration motor that I’ve made myself (the motor itself I got from an old floppy drive).

It’s very useful to get some feedback from the pedal because it helps you control your threshold braking better. When you are under heavy breaking and your wheels lock, the Arduino will activate the motor that will vibrate the pedal. There’s a client software that I wrote in C# that grabs the data from the sim API (I’m using iRacing) and checks if the wheels are locked or not.

iRacing brake vibration client

Here’s a video of it working (yeah, dirty socks):

I’d like to thank the fellow iRacer Stephane Turpin for providing me the algorithm to detect when your wheels are locked or not. iRacing doesn’t provide real time wheel speed information (that’s only available in the file telemetry) so you can’t develop cheats that implement some sort of ABS system. The algorithm Stephane came up is enough for this vibration thing but not accurate enough for cheating. He is also the developer of other great iRacing plugins like the Motion Cockpit View and the CSP Vibration plugin. You can check his softwares here: http://motion_view.byethost4.com/

Below is the Arduino source code. I’m not providing any schematics because it’s as simple as connecting the black wire of the motor to the GND and the red wire to pin 7 in the Arduino.

const int outpin = 7;

void setup() {
  Serial.begin(9600);
  pinMode(outpin, OUTPUT);
}

void loop() {
  if (Serial.available()) {
    int inByte = Serial.read();
    digitalWrite(outpin, inByte);
  }
}

Overall view

Used duct tape and hot glue to fix the motor

Floppy disk motor adapted to a vibration motor

Below is the download link for the client software (includes source code and executable). Code was written in Visual C# 2010, so you’ll need .NET Framework for it to work properly.

The contents of this project is distributed as “donationware”. If you find them useful, please consider doing a small donation.

DOWNLOAD: http://www.fergonez.net/files/iRacingBrake.rar