Highschool scholar builds his dream racing wheel

Racing “video video games” may be extremely reasonable nowadays, with each aspect of the automobile’s physics and their interplay with the asphalt programmed in. These racing sims might present a very immersive expertise — if the participant wasn’t sitting on a immobile sofa utilizing a controller that doesn’t resemble a automobile’s steering wheel within the slightest. To rectify that difficulty, highschool scholar Pranshu Agnihotri constructed his dream racing wheel.

Agnihotri tackled this undertaking for a senior undertaking in his Ideas of Engineering class at Irvington Excessive Faculty. Its objective is to offer a extra reasonable interface for racing video games and sims. It doesn’t have any drive suggestions capabilities, however it would work with any PC sport due to the Arduino that lets the consumer simply rebind controls. These may even emulate keyboard and mouse inputs for video games that weren’t designed to be used with steering wheels.

The mind is an Arduino Leonardo, which Agnihotri selected for its Microchip ATmega32U4 microcontroller. That’s configurable as a normal USB HID, so any pc will acknowledge its inputs with none particular drivers or software program. The steering wheel and electronics enclosure had been 3D-printed in precisely the form Agnihotri wished. An M8 threaded shaft acts because the steering column. A potentiometer offers steering angle enter, whereas restrict switches detect when the participant presses the paddle shifters. The Arduino reads these inputs, then sends out the corresponding gamepad, keyboard, or mouse instructions by way of USB.

We have now to imagine that Agnihotri aced this task, and now he has an superior steering wheel to race with.