KEEP IT SIMPLE! - Sim Lab XP1 Load Cell Sim Racing Pedal Review

hey guys will here so today we're taking a look at the simlab xp1 Sim racing pedal set now I think these are some of the best looking Sim racing pedals available on the market and simlabs say that these are the most complete Sim racing pedals on the market so let's check them out together today and see whether these might be the Sim racing pedals for you let's get started okay so quite a bit to get through today guys firstly a big thank you to simlab for sending across these pedals for us to check out today now we will be cross comparing against a couple of other pedal sets in today's video too so it's important that you guys are aware that all the pedals that we'll be looking at have all been sent to us under the exact same conditions now if you do decide you want to pick up any of the gear that we talk about in today's video there will be some affiliate links down in the description box below those are an awesome way of helping support our work here at boosted media and no additional cost to you guys and that's just something that's available to you guys if you find what we do here of value and you want to help support us so we really appreciate your support there now there is also a 5% discount code available down in that description box for both simlab and grid engineering so if you're looking at picking up any of their gear whether it's these pedals or something else definitely check that out that'll save you a little bit of money but as is always the case here no third party has any sort of external influence on anything that we're talking about today everything that I'm going to be sharing with you guys is purely just my own experience and my own opinions nothing more nothing less so let's get into these pedals starting with pricing so at face value these pedals look like an extremely high-end pedal set they're very classy looking I mean you guys can see for yourself you don't need me to describe that to you but they look like a very expensive Ive set of pedals so I was actually quite surprised they do come in quite a bit cheaper than a lot of other premium pedal sets that we have looked at here in the past on the channel now obviously different pedal sets carry different features and benefits we've looked at a lot of hydraulic pedal sets in the past as well which are obviously quite often a lot more expensive than these are but something like this generally in our experience has you covered for most different driving Styles and that's definitely one of the features that they're they're making a big deal about with these particular pedals so you're looking at a price of $57 obviously check your local taxes and shipping costs on top of that depending on where you are in the world obviously check local resellers as well to make sure you're getting the best deal but $57 as listed on their website at the time of making this video and that is just for the throttle and brake pedal as you see on the table here Unfortunately they didn't send us the clutch pedal but there is an option for a clutch as well so if you want the brake the throttle and the clutch you're looking at $646 if you decide you want to upgrade to the clutch later on down the track you're looking at $184 to pick up the clutch on its own so a bit of a spoiler alert here but I think that are actually pretty reasonably priced for the quality of what you're getting both in terms of the look and feel the design and of course the all important Driving Experience and just to give you a point of comparison here if you saw our recent best products of 2023 video you would have seen that we rated very highly both the V&M pedals and the uh direct Force Pro pedals from vrs they were the two best value for money pedal sets in terms of adaptibility adjustability quality and Driving Experience uh for the price point and I'd say that these slot in pretty nice ly in terms of price to performance by comparison just to give you the price comparison then the V&M pedals at the time of making this video they come in at pretty much exactly the same kind of price as what we're looking at here so $649 for the three pedal set now those are a more kind of industrial look to them they definitely don't look as refined and as classy as these do but they absolutely do get the job done they provide a really excellent Driving Experience and they do also have the option for a damper kit as well which is pretty reasonably priced and does genuinely add quite a bit to the experien whereas this pedal set doesn't have a damper kit available at least at the time of making this video so one thing to consider there definitely check out our video on those V&M pedals if you're looking at getting into a pedal set in this kind of class that'll give you an idea comparing against this video to see what might suit you best look the bottom line is whichever direction you go between those three pedal sets they are all excellent value for money and I can't imagine anybody being disappointed with any choice within those three so that gives you an idea of pricing what we're looking at here kind of sets the stage for getting into the hardware now so let's take a deeper dive into what makes these guys tick now you can see a very Universal Design between both the throttle and the brake and if we had the clutch here as well you'd see that that is quite similar as well same assembly throughout the whole bottom half here which keeps production costs down you can see even the arm which extends up the back here and even the assembly internally here is identical between the two as well so really the only differences in design between the two of them are just a couple of details on the pedal arm itself which you can only see if you get down inside we'll show you that a little bit later on and then the stack between the pedal arm and the back bracing here which obviously is a load cell and spring an elasa stack on the brake pedal and a spring and retainer setup on the throttle now the way these work internally is a little bit different between the two of them we've got a 200 kg load cell on the brake which is actually this assembly underneath this beautiful gold shroud here and then they're using a contactless hall effect sensor for the throttle pedal which I think is a good choice it's pretty common to see that these days generally most pedals around this kind of price point you're looking at either a load cell or or a potentiometer or hall effect effect s a potentiometer has the disadvantage of potentially if they're using a lowquality one taking on dirt and debris it is a mechanical moving part so it can wear out over time hall effect sensor has the advantage of no mechanical moving parts so it's literally just measuring the variance in a magnetic field between a metal plate and a magnet in the arm and that is what's interpreted as your throttle position inside the game now we do sometimes also see load cells used in throttle and clutch pedals it always seems like a bit of an interesting choice to me it does work but it's not really taking advantage of the fundamental advantages that you have in a load cell pedal cuz obviously a throttle pedal and a clutch pedal aren't pressure based inputs they're position based inputs so not so important there and the way they generally work is rather than pushing on the load cell itself they got a little spring internally the more that spring compresses relative to the position of the pedal the more deflection you get in the load cell and that is interpreted as your throttle position but look I think the whole effect sensor is the best choice for a throttle and clutch pedal because it's no more complicated than it needs to be and it gets the job done very cleanly with no mechanical moving parts so good design Choice there in my opinion and just while we're on the subject of electronics we do have 16bit resolution for both the throttle and the brake pedal so to put that in perspective that's 65,535 steps between there and there now of course the throw here is adjustable and we'll get into that later on but if you can feel individual steps over a throw that distance with 65,535 steps of resolution then you are definitely more talented than I am I find that 12bit even 10bit is generally fine for throttle on a break but 16bit resolution and obviously the higher the resolution the more Precision you have in the input whether or not you can actually feel that difference is a subjective thing personally I can't so in terms of materials here a lot of pedal sets around this price point we see pressed steel or laser cut steel this is actually a cast aluminum construction pretty much throughout the entire assembly you can see little brass inserts for all of the uh all of the pivoting points as well as little Teflon bushes everywhere as well so very high Precision Fit and finish overall here no issues with Flex or slop or you know movement from side to side rattling or anything nasty like that no squeaking or any issues like that to speak of throughout the time that we've been testing these either and another thing that I think is really important to call out here while we're talking about the quality of the fit and finish is the fact that these are very quiet in operation as well so they got nice cushion bump stops on both the press and return on the throttle pedal which means when you push it all the way to the bottom or release your foot and have it slap back to zero no loud clunking or metal to metal contact anything like that which can be a deal breaker for a lot of people that are racing in where they need to stay quiet so say you've got somebody trying to sleep in the room next door or study watch TV or something like that it can be the difference between being able to drive or not so definitely not something to be overlooked and very happy to see that both these pedals are actually really quiet one thing we did notice is there is a little bit of a click when you push the brake pedal in the transition between the first stage and the second stage so when that uh when that spring compresses fully and you start to compress the elasta we'll talk about that in more detail as we get on in today's video too but I actually quite like that it's not overly loud and it does give your brain another source of input to kind of you know understand where your threshold point is depending of course on how you have the pedal set up so we'll explore that later on but yeah quiet operation overall nice soft bump stops in every direction and yeah really nothing to complain about whatsoever in terms of the quality of the construction at all no issues to speak of whatsoever so let's talk about Universal adjustments between the two pedals now then we'll get into adjustments specifically for the throttle and Brake then we'll get in and take a look at the software and of course the Driving Experience so in terms of universal adjustment or adjustments that are the same between both pedals quite a few things that you can do here you can adjust the pedal angle through a range of 20° which is plenty to suit pretty much any rig that I can imagine that you'd be mounting these two does also mean that you can mount them inverted and get them to the right angle as well should you wish to do so obviously you'll need to have some sort of a pedal plate that facilitates mounting them upside down but definitely a possibility with these and I like the way they've designed this with these nice big blue shims I guess you could call them almost that uh that secure that in place obviously you want to have this nice nice and tight when you do it back up again because there's nothing to stop it from slipping if those bolts do get loose so we didn't have any issues at all with slippage on those adjustments at all in my driving and I do break with quite a bit of force usually around about 80 kg of Maximum Force for me and yeah no problems at all with that slipping out of adjustment we did just need to make sure that we had it cranked down nice and tight though so plenty of adjustment there in terms of pedal angle we also have adjustments here on the face of the pedal too so we can have a look at the side and the face exactly the same between the two of them so you can adjust the pedal face up and down here to give you a higher or a lower pedal and then if you want to adjust the actual angle of the pedal face relative to the pedal arm there's a little slot here that you can see that's actually three individual holes with a little Ridge in between them and that's to stop any slippage in that particular adjustments that means you've got three separate adjustments there or three different positions that you can have that in which again should have you covered for pretty much any setup that I can imagine at least so that pretty much has you covered in terms of universal adjustments between the two pedals you might be thinking well hang on I can also see these little blue adjusters down on the bottom Here For What appears to be pedal angle on both pedals as well so this is actually a dummy on the on the brake pedal it doesn't actually have any function at all but obviously they've just put it there as well so it looks uh so it looks consistent between the two which I think is a nice touch on the throttle pedal the way this works is you basically got a little retainer screw here which is going to stop it from slipping out of position and then you wind the screw in or out depending on how much throw you want to have in your throttle pedal so there's a little tiny arm on the bottom half of the pedal just there that's not present on the brake pedal and there's a little soft bump stop on that and that interacts with the other half of this screw so if we have a look in the brake pedal you can actually see how that screw kind of comes out there so when we wind that in and out on our throttle pedal that influences how much travel we have on the pedal but again as I said before doesn't have any impact on our on our brake pedal so from the fully wound in position you can see very very very short throw on that throttle much shorter than I would personally want and then if we wind that all the way out I'm not going to bother doing up the retainer just for now but you can see pretty massive throw now one thing you will notice if you wind that all the way out you will get a metal to metal contact when you push the pedal all the way down that reason for that is because that retainer is no longer doing its job and you're actually making metal to metal contact with the little arm itself hitting the bottom of the assembly so what I would suggest is if you do want to go maximum travel wind it all the way out and then slowly wind it in until get to the point where the bump stop starts to do its job again so you can hear that's still metal to metal there going have to go in quite a bit further I think there we go that is just starting to touch now and you can hear now that metal to metal contact sound is gone away and it's just that soft bump stop so we're going to lock that retainer back in place so maximum travel there is more than enough for anybody I ended up having it probably about 3/4 of the maximum setting and that felt right to me but it is a very subjective thing if you got too much travel there it starts to just feel a little bit vague Under Foot if you got too little then you obviously lose Precision in your throttle input so quite important that you spend the time to get that adjusted to suit your particular driving style so while we're still on the subject of adjustments let's look at what else we can do with the throttle pedal specifically then we'll move across and take a look at the elasta and spring stack for the load cell so as you can see here with the brass inserts on the back of the pedal and we can also remove this clever pin and adjust this position up or down so there's three positions in total if we move it to the lower position that is going to make the pedal feel a little bit softer middle is medium and then top you guessed it is harder so it's as simple as literally just releasing the clever pin exactly the same design as on the acch pedals if you're familiar with those and then we literally just put it into whatever position we want slide our clever pin back through lock it off and it's as simple as that so there's actually no tools required for any of the adjustments on these pedals which is really really nice so we'll pop that back into the medium position again which is what I found felt nicest and then you can see we also have the ability we're going to be popping this out again in just a second to show you the uh different spring that you can put in but we'll pop that back to medium we also have a preload adjustment here for our spring tension as well so winding that preload in again is going to adjust how stiff or how soft that pedal feels and we do have a retainer nut on there as well to stop that from slipping while we're driving which is a good thing to see we have had a couple of other pedal sets come through here that don't have a retainer and uh it does end up slipping and adjusting itself over time as you're driving which of course isn't a great thing for muscle memory so good to see that they've got that base covered now you can also replace the spring here as well and they do include a stiffer spring inside the kit very very simple to do you probably already figured this out for yourselves but I'm going to show you anyway so we're just going to release the preload on that spring to the point where it becomes almost non-c captive you can see it's just rattling around a little bit there that means there's no preload on it which means it shouldn't try to sort of fire that way as we release the clever pin so we just pop that out and you can see it just drops down I probably shouldn't have done that I should have been a little bit more careful but uh we simply just go forward with that one thing I do like about this is that the pedal because of its design doesn't try to fall all the way forward or drop all the way in it does still stay within the confines of its movement range there which is quite nice so we literally just pop the assembly out slide this off slide the replacement spring on slide it back into the Teflon sleeve there and it is literally as simple as that to change the spring so again no tools required I'm going to change it back to the weaker spring though cuz I did find the stiffer one for me subjectively didn't feel quite as nice we'll go back to this guy and it is as simple as that back to the medium setting clever pin goes in pop it on and we're just going to wind that preload back to about where I had it before which was somewhere around there I probably should have marked it but hindsight so that is the adjustments on the throttle pedal covered one thing you might have picked up there is that they have marked all of the adjustments in blue which is kind of cool it's similar to what you might find on a road car often the things that you're allowed to touch without impacting your warranty are marked either yellow or blue uh so yeah cool touch on the pedals as well I think so moving across to the brake pedal now same Universal adjustments that we covered already remembering again that the little blue nut on the front here doesn't actually have any function on the brake pedal it's purely there just for Aesthetics to match the throttle and the clutch pedal so as we mentioned earlier in the video it's actually the exact same design of the piston all the way through from here to here so literally the only difference other than just the elasa stack here is the presence or lack thereof of the little tab to restrict the uh the throw of the pedal down in the bottom as we saw earlier so let's move our throttle pedal aside for now and focus in on this guy in some more detail so the way this elasta stack works is quite simple you've got your elasta you've got your spring and then you've got your load cell which sits in behind that so that means that the force that you're applying to the pedal face is being Direct ly applied to the elastomer and spring and then those are exerting their Force upon the load cell directly so while it does look quite similar to the design of the acch Forte and La Prima brake pedal for example it is actually fundamentally different because those actually use a smaller spring inside the load cell assembly itself to apply the pressure to the load cell and that means that they can use a lower rated load cell to translate that braking Force input inside the game now there has been quite a lot of debate about that for me personally I can't feel the difference in driving myself other people don't agree with me on that and you know you're free to share your own experience with that down in the comments below of course but for me personally I find both the L Prima and the Forte pedal suit my driving style really well they just don't have quite the same adjustment range available that we have with some of the other pedal sets that we've looked at including these ones so it's just going to come down to personal preference there if you know that you're a really heavy footed breaker those brake pedals might be absolutely fine for you but if you want to have versatility in terms of adjustment they do have some tuning kits available for the AC Tech pedals that do give you more thr but out of the box there is far more adjustment available here so how does it all work so we've got a preload adjustment very similar to what we saw on the on the throttle pedal just before so we can wind that in or out to preload our spring and this is essentially a two-stage braking system so as you apply Force to the face of the pedal the weaker part of the stack is going to compress first once that's finished compressing then the remaining parts of the stack will begin to compress so what that means in this particular configuration I actually have the stiffer spring here and we'll get into the reasons for that when we get into the Driving Experience later but what that provides is a nice linear transition between that first phase and second phase so as I push the pedal down that spring compresses as the spring becomes fully compressed you feel a transition or you feel like kind of threshold point that allows you to hit that threshold Point consistently so every time you push down the pedal you're able to feel that transition and that allows you to be very consistent with the inputs and this is something that we've seen a lot more manufacturers doing recently and I'm really happy about that so you push the pedal down you feel that transition you get that little click as that spring fully compresses and then after that point you're going to start to get into the phase where you're only compressing that elasta a little bit more now depending on the rating of the spring that you've got installed you will see some compression of the elasta so it's not purely just first phase is spring but once that spring is fully compressed and can't go any further you are just compressing that elastum which is what creates that second phase and you'll see in the driving footage now there is a little bit of compression in that elasta before we max out that heavier spring with the softer spring installed it does tend to compress fully before you get into the elastoma now depending on the driving style and the pedal feel that you're going for there is plenty of adjustment available here too in terms of different Springs and elastomers that you can install as well as a little spacer here which allows you to either restrict the compression of that spring so you can imagine if you put that in there it's going to stop that spring from compressing fully if you want to get rid of that first phase of braking entirely which isn't something that I suggest but some people may want to do so you can actually remove that spring entirely and just run the spacer there and that's going to mean that the only compression that you get in the stack is just the elastoma no spring to compress as a first phase so adjustment wise very simple so we start off by releasing the retainer and then winding the preload off our stack that just means that we're not going to have any Force fighting against us when we release the clever pin trying to fire everything back over that direction so once that's nice and loose and non-c captive you simply just release the clever pin exactly like the throttle pedal before slide it out and that allows you to once again just be very careful that you don't drop that down but what we can do now is bring that up now unlike with the throttle pedal because we don't have that little arm restricting the maximum throw here because of the design of the brake we do just need to be careful that it doesn't fall down and potentially break that cable we also do need to be careful that we don't sort of push it down this way and break the cable either because it is quite loose there and there are actually some exposed thinner core wires there outside of the main assembly so if you were to push that down you would snap those cables off and you would have a bad day so let's not do that so yeah very simp simple here all you need to do is just pull the whole assembly out and that actually gives us quite a nice little look at the uh integrated load cell assembly here too so what we can do is slide that off and that is the load cell there so you can see that little tag there is the part that actually pushes in and out and these little areas here that have got the resin coating on them to protect them that's actually the strain gauge so what happens is as you exert a force on the assembly you can imagine there's a deflection in that little tag there that deflection is what's measured as your braking Force inside the game so very simple but very effective design so let's slide that back in so yeah basically whatever is going on between the pedal face and the load cell that is all being measured by the load cell and uh yeah so it doesn't really matter what you do between there you can set this up to feel however you want and all that really matters ultimately is just how much force you're applying to that load cell so we've got that slotted back in and nice and firm there again just be careful it doesn't get pushed down that way so our stack comprises of a little spring perch which we'll slot back into there we've got our first phase here which is the stiffer spring that they include inside the kit there is also two other Springs here as well so I might actually install the weaker spring so I can show you how that uptake Works in a little bit more detail so that is going to go on next we then have another aluminium part here which forms a spring perch for the spring on this side and also a retainer for our elasta on this side with have a little composite material not sure exactly what that's made of but some sort of composite little spacer in there and that just allows the rod to pass through the center without things misaligning or anything like that so that is uh that's going to sit in in this direction inside the spring perch there we then have our elasta now if you have a really close look at this you'll actually notice on the side of it it actually has 60a written on it which is the shore rating now inside the kit they do include a selection of different ones UH 60 was actually what was installed by default but as I mentioned before I did go with the stiffer spring just to create a slightly more linear transition between first and second phase so 60a Shore rating they also include a 50 a uh what do we got here a 40 which is obviously a lot softer and a 70 as well so the 70 is pretty darn stiff it's more like kind of pushing up against a brick wall so you kind of you get in through the first phase of breaking and then you really are just kind of modulating up against a pretty hard stop with that 70 rating but the point here is that there's enough here to satisfy you whether you like a weaker feeling or a more stiff feeling one thing just to be aware of is if you do run the weaker of the two Springs so the 50 and the 40 Shore rating uh because of the design of the assembly here there's nothing to stop that elastoma from ballooning out and actually uh deforming Beyond its maximum tolerance so they do suggest in the instructions that if you are using those weaker elastomers you do just limit how much physical Force you're putting on those pedals to make sure you don't blow out and ultimately end up damaging those elastom so what that means is that in this scenario where you are heavy footed you want to apply a lot of force but you also want to have a long pedal travel you may inadvertently run into issues over time where these elastomers blow out uh I haven't seen that issue happen on these particular pedals but obviously we have been testing these for a limited amount of time I did have on my original houting velt ultimate pedals not the ultimate plus but the originals I did have a couple of elastomers blow out when I was running those on softer settings and we have also seen that on some other pedals like the I think it was the BJ Sim racing pedals that we tested a while back now uh we had blowouts on on those as well so these elastomers seem to be a better design similar to the material we saw used on the ultimate plus pedals from houstonville and we didn't have any issues with blowouts on those uh running at the similar kind of ratings to what we did have blowouts on the previous design so I can't really comment on the longevity of these let us know in the comments down below if you have had any blowouts though but yeah just one thing to be aware of there again just to reiterate if you do like a long pedal travel but you also want to put a lot of force into the pedals then that is one area where you may potentially run into some issues so that is our stack and then after that you've got just the uh retainer or perch built into the back end of our preload adjustment there so the rod just goes through the entire assembly I'm going to have to be a little bit careful here I don't damage anything putting it through because normally you would slide all this on before uh putting it through the load cell but that's okay so that's all good making sure again that our cable's not snagged anywhere again no tools at all required we're just going to slot that into the correct middle position now interestingly unlike with the throttle position where it does reference these other holes as potential points of adjustment if you wish to do so for a weaker or stiffer feel it doesn't make any reference in the instructions to using these other two holes for the brake pedal now I assume that's because they want to have a nice straight shot uh between the arm and pushing back although it does pivot here as well so I'm not 100% certain on that I'm kind of guessing but either way it doesn't suggest adjusting the feel of the brake using those other two holes so I'm assuming that we shouldn't and I'm not going to describe doing that in the video so pop the clever pin back in again no tools required simp simple as that and then we just wind in our preload to where we want it just make sure that your spring is seated correctly here as well you may just sort of need to rotate it to get it in exactly the right position so it's not sort of offset a little bit so we'll just wind in a little bit of preload on this guy as well and lock it off with the retainer and you can see now with the weaker spring in there how that first and second phase of braking Works in a little bit more detail so we push down first phase is where the spring is fully compressed and we feel a clearly defined threshold point that we can hit consistently and then modulate our braking pressure beyond that so you can imagine you hit the threshold point you probably calibrate that to around 80% in iRacing for example and 100% in ACC and then you can modulate your input around that as you see fit so everybody's going to be a little bit different there where you feel that threshold point it might be different from somebody else so it's just a matter of experimenting with the different elastomers and Springs to get exactly the feel that you're after now I just want to quickly show you the configuration with that spacer installed as well so we'll pop this off quickly once more just release that that preload pop it out again and being very careful again not to damage that cable so we're just going to lift it up from here and we've got two options we can install the spacer with the spring still there and go like that and with that done what's going to happen now just wind in a bit a preload again we're now restricting the compression of that spring so we do still have that little bit of initial uptake and that could be used for example to just simulate the feeling of uh you know the pad interfacing with the rotor in the car for example so you get that little initial phase and then you're relying purely just on that elasta after that point so that would be a different way of setting the pedal up so it's kind of like one phase of breaking but then with the second phase of that initial uptake so you'd have a little bit less preload and You' probably want to run the weakest spring and then you can also as I mentioned before if you want to run it again preload off you could also run it with uh with no spring in there at all so the way that would work would be literally just take the spring out with the spacer in there drop this all back into position put the assembly back together and Slide the clever pin through pop it down and then obviously we're going to need to wind it a little bit more preload there just to make sure that everything is locked in position and captive there we go and now rather than having any sort of initial phase there purely all we're relying on is just that elasa so if you want to have a really short throw and a really stiff brake Feel Again obviously you can adjust the feeling of this overall depending on which elastom you put in but you can imagine if you put the 70 Shore in there it's going to be pretty much just like pushing up against a brick wall so it's purely just going to be the amount of force that you're applying to the pedal you're not going to have that clearly defined threshold point but again it might suit some people the point here is that you have the ability to make all these adjustments should you wish to do so okay so a couple other quick things to be aware of firstly mounting so really like what they've done here nice big slots here on the bottom so those are what have we got 135 mm long that's going to allow you lots of adjustment to move forward and back on your rig so if you want to offset the position of the brake relative to the throttle for example for heel and toe that is nice and possible with this design so 7 mm wide on the slot so suitable for M6 bolts which they do include I'll show you that in just a second and then the spacing between the two slots on either side is 98 mm by my measurement so we actually ended up mounting these on the base plate that came with my houstonville ultimate plus pedals it was just something that we had laying around and it was nice and easy to Chuck those on but you can bolt them directly to profile they don't include any sort of heal plate of course though so you will just need to make sure you've got something covered for that simlab do sell their own heal plate though which is suitable for use on most aluminium profile rigs including of course their own branded ones too so no issues there whatsoever in terms of mounting nice and simple and there was no flex at all apparent in the assembly at all so all absolutely fine there so for mounting they do include a bag of all sorts of different length bolts and washers te- nuts and whatnot so pretty much everything to get you sorted on any sort of aluminium profile rig they do also include some Nylock nuts there too so that's what we actually end up using on the houon V plat so nice high quality M6 bolts went through with washers on top and then a Nylock nut underneath to secure it in place so nice that they include all the mounting hardware and uh not only that but a selection of different types of mounting hardware to pretty much have you covered for any rig that I can imagine I can't imagine a rig that we've ever tested here that that Hardware wouldn't have you covered on so yeah good high quality experience throughout there so lastly just a quickly touch on the electronics package now we talked about the load cell and the hall effect sensor previously uh you might be wondering how's this all controlled how does it plug into your PC so on the back of each pedal we have a little RJ I think it's rj12 connection on the back of each one so they include inside the box some shorter RJ cables which are 28 cm long uh that's if you're going to have the control box nice and close to you or if you want to mount the control box further away they do also include some uh slightly over 70 cm long cables too so nice that they include both options there and then the little control box which isn't really so little I suppose it's actually quite large this is a control box here so we' got inputs there for our throttle brake clutch extension one and extension two now if you have a look at the face here you'll notice rj1 12s I think they are for the throttle brake and as well as extension 2 and what looks like an RJ45 for extension 1 so a couple of different accessory options there and then on the side here we have a micro USB connection for connecting back to your PC now interestingly because their instructions actually call out a usbb connection but it is a micro USB and they include a nice long micro USB cable here and uh that is a good opportunity to talk about the build quality of this guy so you'll notice it is just a plastic assembly some other pedal sets that we've tested at around this kind of price point do include a shielded metal enclosure and I also noticed that the USB cable itself doesn't have a ferite choke on it either which could potentially cause some issues with electromagnetic interference now we did run into some issues with our throttle signal bouncing between 0 and 100% quite a bit with these pedals I did do quite a bit of troubleshooting I tried wrapping this up in aluminum foil to Shield it I tried using a uh choked USB cable as well but given that it seems to be variance in the analog signal here bouncing between 0 and 100% I think we might actually have some sort of a fault within the pedal itself we did actually try with all of the included RJ cables too and uh yeah we just had a it wasn't doing it all the time so we were still able to do our testing but there was some flickering between zero and 100% on the throttle pedal so we did get in touch with them and they are actually going to send out a replacement set which will which we'll retest and we'll let you know in a pin comment down below uh what the experience is with that but let us know if you do own a set of these pedals whether you've had similar issues with sensitivity on the throttle pedal uh look I I didn't want to sort of you know pause doing the review video and wait for them to send out replacement parts simply because it wasn't as I said it wasn't doing it all the time so we were able to still test the pedal but yeah look in that particular case I don't think that it's being caused by uh by this not being shielded I'm pretty confident that it's some sort of an issue with the hall effect sensor in the throttle pedal itself but we'll update you as I said in the comments down below to let you know exactly what the outcome is there but that's the control box you can see little tabs here as well for easily mounting it onto your rig regardless of where you want to put it and uh yeah it is as simple as that guys so I think we're ready now to move over onto the rig let's talk about software calibration and adjustment and then get into the Driving Experience okay so quick look at the simlab grid engineering race director software now the first thing you need to know here is that this is a kind of all-encompassing software package which allows you to control a multitude of different devices from both of these Brands so it's not software that's only for the pedals that's important if you are looking at expanding within the uh grid and simlab ecosystem later on because it means you're going to be able to control all of your devices from the one piece of software so when you initially set up you're going to go into the settings menu here and you can see these are the devices that are available from Grid simlab at the moment and you just basically click on these as you click on them they'll show up down the left hand side as you can see there and you can click on each one of those to go into the settings for that particular device so say for example there's our MPX wheel which we reviewed recently definitely check out that review that was actually my favorite wheel of 2023 a really impressive piece of kit so link down the description below I just want to pause there quickly cuz I do need to let you know about one thing that did happen with installing the software we ran into a bit of an issue with the software being detected as a Trojan the agent Tesla Trojan to be specific and Windows Defender was actually telling me that it was a severe threat and every time I installed the software it was either not allowing me to install it or it was you know popping up and then deleting the files and making the software at not work at all so I ended up having to go in and add some exceptions there now I'm not going to sit here and tell you that the file's clean obviously viously there is always the possibility that a server becomes compromised and a file becomes infected uh on the on the server itself so what I would suggest is if you do run into this issue just get in touch with simlab make sure that you have their confirmation that the files on their servers are clean just wanted to let you know that that was something that did happened to us but let's click back on the pedals now and quickly run you through what we have here in terms of software adjustment so it's The Usual Suspects here there's nothing particularly unique or exciting about this but it does do all the things that most people are going to want out of piece of software like this so initial calibration very simple you just click on the calibrate button push each one of the pedals to 100% release it back to zero click on finish calibration as simple as that I did uh run into a couple of issues with flickering on the throttle pedal but just in general you might find because it is a hall effect sensor you'll get a little bit of flickering down low uh what I do to counteract that is to just add a dead zone of 5% I also always as a matter of course for any set of pedals that I use these days at a small Dead Zone up top as well just to account for any drift in calibration that you might get just to ensure you're always hitting absolute 100% throttle input there similar with your break and clutch as well we don't have the clutch so we can't show you that what I actually did here is I dialed in my bottom Dead Zone to 100% just to remove any input what I found is that uh with no calibration there at all we were actually getting a little bit of noise coming through that empty Channel and that was causing the calibration inside some games to go funny sometimes cuz it was detecting the input on the wrong channel so just adding that 100% dead zone there if you don't have a clutch takes care of that because it means that you're always getting a 0% signal regardless of what might be happening on the control box then break for calibration there uh it is an arbitrary value so what I like to do same as what I do with any set of load sale pedals I hit calibrate I push to my threshold point or the point where I feel that I can hit consistently then I push a little bit past that just to get to my 100% input value or the maximum amount that I ever want to have to push the pedal to reach 100% inside the game then I release and hit finish calibration if I've done it right then if I hit my threshold point I should be at around about 80% braking input for iRacing or you might want to calibrate this to be 100% for ACC depending on your driving Style again I add a little bit of dead zone down the bottom just to account for resting my foot on the brake so I'm not brake dragging at all and then up the top here you can see we also have nonlinear response curves as well so if you do want to set up a uh more nonlinear throttle curve for example to account for a car that doesn't have a lot of power so you get on the power a little bit quicker you can do that with a curve that looks something like this if you're driving a really high power rear wheel drive car that uh tends to slip and uh make you crash on Corner exit you can set up a response curve that looks a little bit more like this since it's going to taper on a little bit more slowly to give you a slightly smoother Corner exit I generally just stay on linear for everything but particularly with the clutch pedal it can be useful to account for various different bite points in different cars for example then you can also save profiles here as well so you just simply type in a name hit save and then you can choose from any of the profiles that you set up over in here now we did get a couple of little glitches in the software it's not doing it now of course but I did find occasionally I was getting some weird stuff going on with the graphs just kind of showing all garbled and uh jumping all over the place so there's a little bit of work there to be done just to tighten things up but overall the software is you know pretty basic but it's well presented it does all the things it needs to do and for me at least there's nothing missing here so let's move on now and talk about what these pedals are like to drive with okay so let's talk about the driving experience with these xp1 pedals normally when we do a pedal test we take you out on the track and we kind of talk you through the experience driving with the pedals we normally use the Porsche 911 Cup car around IMA in iRacing now that is what I use to test I'm not going to waste your time driving you around the track and talking about the experience simply because the amount of adjustment available on these pedals particularly with the brake pedal means that you know it's kind of a bit of a waste of time because you can dial it into feel like pretty much whatever you want so what I'll do instead is I'll give you a summary of what the experience was like over overall so firstly very smooth operation on both the pedals there's absolutely no issues with flex or excessive movement slop from side to side you know sloppy dead zones anything like that they're very tight they're very rigid and uh no funny vibrations another thing that I really appreciated driving with these pedals is they are very quiet in operation too so let me to just quickly give you a demonstration of that so pushing to 100% on the throttle pretty much completely silent return back to zero nice and quiet as well definitely not going to be the loudest thing on your rig I don't think the brake pedal is a little bit more noisy Return To Zero is pretty quiet it does have a little bit of a click when you reach the uh threshold where your spring is fully compressed and you start to engage the elasta a little bit more so look to be honest with you guys actually don't mind that because it actually does give you a uh an audible uh sound to help your brain to interpret when you're actually reaching that threshold point which can actually be quite useful now obviously if you got the sound turned up and you know headphones that are quite loud then you're not going to you're not going to really notice that but you do actually feel that sensation of the transition in the pedal as well when you get that uh when you get that little sound that little clicking sound you do actually feel a tiny little uh change in the way the pedal feels now it's not like a nottin or a gripping or binding or anything like that but it is actually really good because it gives you or at least for me subjectively I found it really good because it gives you that ability to actually feel when you're transitioning across and that creates a really nice threshold point in the in the brake pedal so as we mentioned before you can set this up to feel however you want you can even put a spacer in there instead of a spring if you want to so that you're only pushing on that elasta and only feeling the progressive nature of that elastomer as it compresses but with the way I've got it set up here I actually did end up going with a slightly stiffer spring and staying with that 60 Shore rating elastomer in there I found the weakest spring that was installed by default did uh it it kind of gave me too much of a transition between the initial phase and the elasa phase and what that meant was that it the pedal kind of felt like it lacked a little bit of definition in the elasta phase simply because that initial phase was too soft as the way I've got it set up now with the stiffer spring it's a lot more Progressive across you still do get that nice clearly defined threshold point but it doesn't feel quite so unnatural as it did by default and my lap times instantly were more consistent and faster when I when I transitioned across to that combination but again it is going to be very subje Ive some people are going to want to have stiffer some people are going to want to have softer longer shorter travel the important thing is that you can achieve all of those outcomes with these pedals what I think is most important you guys have heard me say this a million times in pedal reviews by now is that you do have that clearly defined threshold point that allows you to feel where you're hitting your threshold Breaking Point whatever You' got that set to so in ACC 100% in iRacing generally about 80% and then modulate your input around that to achieve proper Trail breaking as you turn in to the apex of the corner so yeah all those important things that I look for in the set of pedals all absolutely fine with these pedals and really nothing to complain about whatsoever I think all the things that they're setting out to do there uh they do a really good job of I wouldn't say that they feel any better than some of the other high-end load cell pedals that we've tested in the past so I'd say I'd put these on par in terms of the performance and variability in the setup to something like say your V&M pedals that we looked at recently as well as say the vrs pedals or even up to your Houston V ultimate plus pedals for example although those do have dampers included and those do make a difference they do make the pedals feel a little bit more mechanically connected to something inside the car so that isn't an option at least in this point in time with these particular pedals but look in terms of all the things that I look for in a set of pedals all the things that I think are important to driving quickly and consistently these do a really good job and there's really nothing to complain about we'll obviously need to sort out that issue with the throttle pedal spiking but I don't expect that's going to be an issue for everybody cuz if it was then obviously you'd be hearing about it in other reviews and you know customers would of course be complaining about it too so I'm sure sure we'll get that sorted out and Yeah otherwise I think they do a really good job I do love the little details like uh not needing any tools to make the basic adjustments that you might want to make on the Flight of the pedals and aesthetically as well I think subjectively these pedals are just really really good- looking they hit a really nice balance between looking kind of futuristic and kind of you know like there's a lot going on but they also have a kind of simplistic design to them as well they aren't completely over the top and ridiculous looking either so yeah I don't think they look out of place on any rig and particularly if you got a rig that's set up in your living room on something like a play seat trophy that we looked at recently for example I think these are going to look really good on a rig like that and I think that pretty much summarizes everything you need to know about these pedals absolutely no issues at all recommending them I think they do a really good job for the price point there are cheaper pedals on the market that are going to give you you know similar lap time similar consistency but in terms of build quality adjustability uh you know what they look like on the rig quietness all those important things they definitely come across as a pedal set that has been designed specifically for Sim Racers with the things that Sim racers are looking for primarily in mind rather than something that's just adapted across from a race car and that makes a big difference if you're driving in scenarios where you need to keep the noise down for example or you just want to have something that you can adjust relatively easily between different types of cars that you might be driving so yeah it's a thumbs up from me guys hopefully you found the video interesting and useful if it has please do leave a thumbs up make sure you subscribe to the channel as well so you don't miss out on future videos like this one we are going to be looking at a bunch of other pedal sets throughout the course of this year as well we're also going to be taking a look at the p1000 pedals from SIM magic very soon with those haptic feedback motos on them which I've been very very impressed with so definitely subscribe so don't miss out on that I know subscribing doesn't necessarily make a big difference to what you see in your news feed but it does go a long way towards making sure that YouTube knows his content is useful so it shows it to other SIM Racers like yourself so thank very much for the support there but above all thank you very much for watching guys if you do decide you want to pick up a set of these pedals we do have some links down in the description below which is an awesome way of helping support us as well thanks for watching guys and I will see you again very soon bye

Channel: Boosted Media

Views: 21,451

Keywords: simlab pedals, XP1 pedals, best sim racing pedals, sim racing pedal review, best sim racing pedals 2024, load cell, best pedals for sim racing, best pedals for driving simulator, boosted media, sim racing review, simlab pedal review, best load cell pedals, sim racing setup, sim rig

Id: Rk6WlkZ7LIk

Length: 43min 53sec (2633 seconds)

Published: Mon Jan 15 2024