Simagic Alpha Mini DD Wheelbase Review

[Music] uh [Music] welcome to another edition of the simracing garage i'm barry rowland in this episode i'll be reviewing the alpha mini direct drive wheelbase from the guys at sim magic a true servo motor equipped wheelbase system with a peak torque rating of 10 newton meters time to put it through the srg's review process and see how it does so let's get to it let's take a closer look at this alpha mini from sim magic so this looks just like the regular alpha of course it's smaller as far as the dimensions go it doesn't weigh as much this comes in at 14 pounds so just over 14 pounds which is 6.3 kilos for everybody else in the world it has 10 newt meters of peak torque versus the 15 newton meters of the regular alpha and we'll see how that feels once we're in the cockpit and driving it it is 170 millimeters long from the back casing which appears to be metal to the front lip here of the flange and then we have another 100 millimeters from there to the end of the wheelbase side quick release system and i do like the hub that they have on here that connects to the motor shaft it's a pretty clean look to it and you don't see any bolts on the sides anywhere it's very clean all the way around it has a carbon fiber ring around the front part and this is where they are putting their transceiver for the wireless duties which is by the way a very good solution i liked it on the m10 that i tested and yeah it's just the way to go if you ask me the other wheel out there that is a true wireless wheel or you can use it as a true wireless wheelbase the simucube remember when i did review on that one it had a plastic window on the back here where the electronics packages are sitting and yeah not optimal obviously if you have a wheel sitting on in front here with the wheels transceiver for the wireless sitting over here it has to go around the wheel and any mount that you might have sitting up here and then they went to a stubby antenna sticking out the back and the latest is a 90 degree bent antenna that you put on the back and it not quite sticking above the motor casing though i'm not sure why they do it that way but anyway this as i think most would agree is probably the best way to go because you have it right up front here and yes you have to have a special pathway or some kind of a tunnel in here to run your wires for supporting this transceiver it's in the front and of course sim magic obviously when they made their servos or had them made designed that into it now when we have the wheel sitting on the front and i'll use this one as example you can see that the sim magic wireless wheels have their wireless receiver up here a transceiver what do you want to call it and it's sitting right where this one is even when you're turning it it's still in much closer proximity than something sitting in the back here trying to get around the metal of the casing and any metal on the motor mounts so yeah i never had any problems with dropouts or anything with this but i never had any problems with dropouts on the semi cube i had either but the signal got weak when i was turning the wheel this one stays pretty steady as you might imagine so yeah kudos to sim magic for using that in their server motors and their m2 which is a stepper motor system so yeah i like what i'm seeing on that then we have a flange here that is tapped on the holes here for mounting those are m8 and this is a 92 millimeter centers on these holes which will fit the three front plate or front mount cockpit motor mount that i have tested with it so far so it does fit that which is very good i was worried that it wouldn't fit that even though they do have a side mount system for it right here and we'll look at that when we go through the mounting segment on the review but yeah i like the way they did that and they have some holes on the side these are them sixes and i believe these are 50 i remember correctly let me measure that again i believe those are 50 centers on the side yeah they're 50 centers on the sides but on the bottom we also have a pattern of holes and they're in a square pattern i believe they were in 60 67 looks like centers on that and i think they're 67 the other way too and this is so we can take the wheelbase no that's actually 80 this way okay so about 67 this way and 80 the other way let me put this down what i'm doing this might make a little easier yeah about 67 there so you can have a flat plate that you mount this to drill some holes in it that matches this pattern and then you can come up underneath with some m6 bolts and bolt it down securely to the flat plate that's how you want to mount it what else can we talk about well let's talk about the connections now this little piece on the back the cap here again this is where the electronics packages are being mounted along with the encoder or resolver whatever they happen to be using for this servo motors position sensing and we have a couple of ports here we have usb and we have power on the other side we've got the can bus which looks like ufb and that's for programming and then we have another one called safeb which would be the emergency stop which i do not have with this wheelbase and i don't know if they're available yet or something they're developing for the future use but i'm sure that's what that's for anything else we want to talk about here not much the contacts on the front you see one here this is wireless wheel why does it have contacts well because this wheel needs power to light up the leds that's in it and sim magic obviously if you've seen the reviews before i'm not reviewing the wheel back here because i already did that with the i can remember which one it was i think i reviewed it on its own but yeah this is where they get the power to power the leds on the wheel because they're they require more power than just like running a usb board on a button plate wheel and yeah just for switches and things like that doesn't require as much power but when you start throwing leds on there yeah that's going to require more power so that's how they get that all right pretty clean as you can see the whole package here the power supply you get is a switching power supply that will recognize what the input voltage is and switch to that so we're here at 115 volt in north america so it'll switch that automatically and if you're over in europe or asia and you have the 240 it will switch to that now it is a 36 volt max at 6 amps that's peak for this power supply and that's 216 watt it feels pretty light actually for a 36 volt power supply but we'll see how that works once it gets there or actually once we get there and we're using it it's got a light over here and this turns green when you power it up we have a strain relief for the cable that goes in that goes out to our motor itself and it has a ferrite core on it rather large one which is nice because at least they're paying attention and making an effort to mitigate emi interference with this motor with other things we have a four pin connector on here get a good shot of that there and it has a key system to it and you can see that little notch hanging down there and we have a little piece on the bottom that's flat that determines where it goes we also have two little maintaining clips or tension clips there that have these little dimples on them not sure how well you're going to see that but there they are it has a flat piece here that has an arrow on it that indicates which way we need to mount this and the arrow means mount the flat part towards the front of the wheel so we'll go ahead and see if that works so i got the arrow from the wheels that way see if i can plug it in yep no problem there we have it pretty simple now the power cord that they sent with this now this is a european 240 power cord because it's got these funky blades on it it's not a 115 which is no big deal because it's the same plug on the back as you know computer plugs things like that usually you have a few of these cables laying around somewhere in your house at least i do and i'll use one of mine that's one for 115 no problem because remember again this will automatically detect the voltage and switch to that now here's the one thing i'm not crazy about and who was it uh some experience did the same thing with their wheel it's the switch in line with the power cord see that instead of putting a switch on the back here like fanatec does simucube does they put it on the cord here when you know i can't believe there's not enough room to put a little switch back here but you know it is what it is this is what we get a switch on the cord and i'm crazy about this because you have to plug this into a socket or a power strip somewhere and then you're going to run this over to your power supply on the back over here and then you're going to have to switch dangling around the cord somewhere not that convenient to get to if you want to turn it on and off quickly whereas you can actually reach around the back on these other ones and just hit the button and you're good to go so not as elegant as the wireless solution you know it's funny a lot of products that come through here at the srg i'll see something like the way they do their wireless solution go wow you know that's the way to do it and then then you get this with it too though and i'm thinking wow that's really not the way to do it but it's usable it'll get the job done in a day you know i can argue with that but yeah they i think they could have done a little better with the solution for your power on and off but there you have it we get a pack of m6 screws here these are pan heads or button heads what do you want to call them and it comes with a wrench to be able to tighten them we get two links we get a 15 millimeter and a 10 millimeter bolt depending on what you're mounting it to at least they give you two different links and they give you five of each because there's only four holes you do have an extra screw which is also nice to have an extra screw and then we have different depths so if your plate that you're mounting it to on the bottom is thicker or thinner you have a screw that will accommodate hopefully of course my luck it'll be right between right all right so let's talk about the only accessory that i got with this and they sent me was this bracket it's a mounting bracket and it's very slick looking you know just like the rest of the sim magic products is it's well finished very professional presentation this has little indentations here because we're going to be using this they send you a little pack like this that has some button heads and some flat head screws in it and they also send you some spring vaulting nuts very nice so if you're going to mount this to profile you can put your t-nuts in there and then of course you run a bolt through it this and then mount it that way and they give you a couple of wrenches for the different sizes of the bolts so that comes with that kit these have some nice counter board or beveled countersunk holes in it so you can adjust the height or angle of your wheelbase and it mounts like this we have a this is you have a right side and a left side plate but we'll get to that in detail but we just mount this with these two holes because you can see they are also countersunk so we can put a flathead in there it won't interfere with the bracket this is right and right yeah the bracket can go up and down like that but we'll get to more detail once we get to the mounting section i'll probably mounting this on a front mount wheel mount when i'm actually driving it anything else i want to talk about i think that's it uh price well they have an introductory price they sent me this little flyer thing that they're going to be sending everyone that is 500 until the end of august so by the time you see this review it's probably going to be halfway through august already and i just got the flyer like last week so it was supposed to be going on for a couple of months according to flyer but yeah i wasn't paying attention to any of that so anyway 500 and then i don't know what it's going to be after that i've seen it advertised at 530 dollars at some website somewhere and so i guess that gives an indication maybe that's where it will be i don't know so again that's something that i can't tell you i just don't know yet the final answer on that so yeah that's the closer look first thing we'll do on our look inside is take a look at the front assembly on the wheelbase and that consists of the quick release on the front here this has some traces on it or contacts if you will and you can see there's four of them but there's really only three the middle one in the very center here is a ground a rather yeah that's a ground then we have these two pieces here they are five volts positive and you can see they're joined in the middle so they're essentially the same thing and then on the outside it's supposed to be a ground too i couldn't get ground off of this i tried to i could get a 5 volts from using measuring from this ground over here to this pad but when i went from this pad back over to where the five volts was i couldn't get anything so i'm not sure what that the function of the that ground is but yeah it just didn't work but anyway so what we're going to do here and by the way before we get there these contact points obviously are for the pins inside of our quick releases on all the sim magic wheels there's five pins in there they're spring loaded so that when you attach your wheel to it it will provide constant pressure on these contact points so that the power can go back and forth to power our steering wheel so the first thing we're going to do is pull this off and there are no less than six i believe it's six isn't it yeah six 2.5 millimeter wrench size bolts on here i believe they're 4 mil or m4s rather so we're going to go ahead and take these off now when you take something like this off and you're trying to hold it if they're really tight from the factory you might have to get my 2.5 out here and i always use one of these to initially loosen bolts not one of these little t-wrenches or whatever so that yeah you can get the proper torque on it so sometimes it might be hard for you to hold this to get these loose all right but it depends on the wheel and all that stuff if there's any loctite in here and i think i can get these to go just by holding it there we go they are tight so again that's why i'm using this wrench to get them loose so i didn't have to use my strap wrench yet but when we get to the inside of this hub i might have to do that so i'm going to go ahead and get the rest of these broken loose so as soon as i did that i could see it's kind of i can feel it kind of loose on the top here so that's a 2.5 and i'm going to take one of my little speed wrenches here and just go ahead and take these off i'll get my little magnetic dish out here so i don't lose anything last thing you want to do when you're doing this kind of stuff is lose the screws and they're not very big look to be about eight mil long i imagine i'll give you a close-up shot of that little flathead screw it's like stainless steel units and maybe not sticking pretty good all right so we'll go ahead and get these off all right i got the screws loose let me go ahead and get the rest of them out you can see it kind of moved on me there when i was down to two of them so you want to obviously pay attention what's going on when you're doing that because if you have contacts on the front like we do here then obviously there's going to be some wires behind it so you want to be careful when you lift this up and you can see there are some wires there and if you look down inside of here there's a plug let's get this a little closer you guys can see that there's a white plug in there see that and that's obviously giving the contact going through the hub here and we'll look at that a little bit more detail here what i'm going to do is try to get this out and i have a set of long needle nose pliers here for electronics and just grab the plug on the sides and just kind of wiggle it from side to side as i put a little pressure on it to get it loose again you want to be very careful when you're doing this you don't want to break anything because that's going to make you fix things which you don't want to fix i think i got it loose there and there it is all right it's a little molex plug there i'll give you a close look inside what that looks like if i get it focused there it is all right and again a close-up of the front contact piece nice little aluminum piece here the finish is nice on this so now what we've got to do is get this hub off and it's typical of a direct drive wheel that's a servo motor you're going to have a clamping hub on here and inside of this one we have four bolts see those black bolts there and what i'm gonna have to do is loosen these up now they're gonna be tight so i'm gonna use a little tool here to help me do this now i believe these are three mil already got my three mil wrench here yes three mil and i'm gonna use the strap wrench and that simply just goes around this and of course you need to put it in the correct orientation so if i'm turning this way i want to be able to hold the hub going torque this way so i'm going to be turning this counterclockwise but the torque for me to hold is going to be clockwise this way so i'm going to go ahead and tighten this up right in the middle there like that and it'll just kind of stay there so now we'll get our wrench out and we're going after those bolts go ahead and get that in there hold the wrench like this so as i do this i have some counter pressure there we go let me get that off of there all right so i've got them loose i'm going to loosen this back up so i can get it off loosen a little more there we go again this thing is a lifesaver for a lot of stuff one of these strap wrenches highly recommend you have one of these somewhere in your toolbox different sizes too all right so i've got these bolts in here loose so all of them are loose a little wire all the way there but this hub is not going to come off yet because it's already squeezed down on there and just loosening the bolts doesn't get it out so i'm going to do is loosen these up a bit maybe i don't know three four millimeters just so i've got plenty of room when it was ready to release it will release go get them up and if you look down in here i'll show you this there are a couple of holes most of these type of hubs will have a self pressing feature on it so that once we put some bolts in these you see these little two holes in there we got four of the bolts there we got the hole in the top and we got one on the bottom normally we just take one of these bolts out these are m4s put one in each one of those holes with these loose obviously you want to make sure they're loose first or you'll never get it off then we're gonna use those two bolts that are in those empty holes there to actually press this hub off right now i've got a couple of them somewhere around oh i got them in my dish here so i've got these guys these are my m4 bolts and they're long enough these are about 25 mil long and i'm going to just put them in those holes i'm going to turn this up to do it so you won't be able to see me actually do that but you'll know what i'm doing and yeah so we get these started and remember you've got to have the other bolts loose or you're wasting your time you end up breaking snapping a bolt i imagine or something like that i'm gonna go ahead and run these down to where they're making contact and these are a little snugger then the bolts that i took out no actually it broke free there it went down easy okay so now the bolts are down to where they're making contact and won't go down anymore without more pressure so what i'm going to do is i'm going to hold this i think i can hold this and press these down just like tightening them up and this is going to lift this hub up so that's what we're going to do let me show you where those bolts are right now my wire out of the way all right there you go so we're going to be tightening that one in this other one over here see how that goes hopefully it'll loosen it up okay that came off pretty good actually so once you tighten those downs it will release and now we can take this up now there's probably going to be some wiring in here so again we want to be very careful what we're doing here i'm going to lift it up and i'm just going to kind of look down in here and make sure i don't have any wires if you look in there there are no wires it's all clean in there it's pretty cool so i'm going to take this off and here's the hub and on the bottom of the hub we have another plate here this one there and this is the plate that has some electronics on it now this is a magnetically coupled section in here that will send current into this piece if you ever know if you guys know what a transformer is it takes a certain voltage and then either kicks it up or kicks it down but there's a gap between the two the coils or the the wrap the wire windings this is the same principle so we're using a magnetic field to induce the current in this and of course the circuitry is going to control that current so that it gives the proper power to our steering wheel i'm going to go ahead and take this one loose now remember this is magnetic stuff so typically we're going to find plastic screws in here let me get a closer look at that so these are actually nylon screws because you can't put metal screws in here if you do it's they're gonna yeah it's gonna mess things up because they're they will turn magnetic and yeah it's just gonna mess things up not a good idea so these are plastic or nylon so you have to be careful taking them out and putting them back in so you wanna be gentle with this stuff and i'm going to carefully turn it and they shouldn't be too tight either it should be easy to get out but i'm always very cautious with this stuff because i don't want yeah we'd have a big problem here if i strip one of these out well maybe not i think i got some laying around but yeah you don't want to do it anyway if you don't have to so this screw is coming out let me show you what that one looks like all right so nothing really to see here this looks like to be an m3 maybe maybe even an m 2.5 but it's a very small flat head as you can see from that shot and you can see when i drop those in they don't make the ching sound being plastic and all so again and i'm paying attention very close attention to how this is coming off because i want to make sure that i put this back on exactly the same way it came off now we have this wire going through the hub and it's going to be connected to the board on the other side i'm just going to pull the board apart so you can take a look i could unplug it but i think this is enough here showing you the circuitry here on the inside now this is receiving a magnetic field and that makes this create its own current pretty neat huh so that's how they're powering it wirelessly very very slick i like the way they did this more manufacturers are starting to do this kind of thing yeah sim magic is doing it the right way i think all right so now that we know how this is working let's go ahead and pull this one off i believe this is two mil let me see here what we're going to pull off now is or maybe not pull it off but pull it apart so you guys can see it is this carbon fiber ring around here this should have some wires going to it in another circuit board like we just saw in this piece right should have the counterpart under here and we should see a wireless transceiver in here too so i'm going to go ahead and carefully loosen these up but again there's going to be some wires in here so i want to be careful with what i'm doing this is in two millimeter hex in here and these are actually metal i believe let's see these little gas there we go and they're only like five mil tall you see how small that is yeah it didn't make a ding but it's definitely steel all right so we'll go ahead and get these other three out and again they're very short so you don't have to turn them very much to get them out i like to kind of loosen them all in kind of a sequence so there's no hang-ups anywhere that one came out you can see if i don't know how well you can see this but the plate's actually loose already i'll get one more out i'm going to be very careful here because i don't want to stretch any wires out hopefully i can show you guys this without doing that all right so there's the front off and i'm going again put this down here so you guys can see it i'm going to try to slide this off i'm going to look down straight down on top of this while i'm pulling it apart to make sure that i have enough room to do that there should be because they had to assemble this unless they assembled it and then tightened the wires pulled them from the rear to tighten them up a bit or take slack out of it but this looks like i'll have enough room without creating any issues there we go all right that's nice so we've got the close-up camera here i'm gonna see if i can't dangle this down so you guys can see what's going on so here's the other part of that circuitry so this is actually inducing the magnetic field in this ring here and then of course it's being picked up by our guy over here right on the hub and you can also see in here that our wireless receiver is this guy right down there see the blue part and you should be able to see some some kind of looks like a a digital dc signal on a pattern there and that's the antenna all right so you don't need much antenna if you're facing directly towards the receiver transceiver on the other side like sim magic setups do so this is much more elegant solution than yeah just about anything i've seen out there so far so that's what it looks like not much else to see we do have some wires hanging down here they're going in you can see how they're going in here so there's a journal or a channel cut inside the servo motor in production for them to be able to use that so right from production the initial design when they were making this wheel and some magic wheels in general they knew what they were going to be doing as far as their wireless setups and ordered their servo motors to be able to accompany or have these wires in it i don't know they might even have been able to drill them depending on how the servo motor itself is constructed all right so i'm going to gently put this back on here like this i don't want to mess anything up obviously and then when we're putting this back on i'm going to pay attention i'm going to be looking straight down where those wires are to make sure when i get this back on here and i kind of press it down i want to make sure that the wires don't feel like they're being crushed or anything all right i just want to make sure there's plenty of room for them in there all right so there we have it there's the front assembly of the alpha mini from sim magic what we'll do next is when we come back we'll take a look at what's going on inside the back now we can see what's on the other side of the wheelbase assembly we're going to remove this cover here it's pretty deep covered as you've seen in the closer look it has on the side a usb and a power connector other side we've got a can bus and safe b which i imagine would be the emergency stop and can bus it's like for firmware upgrades things like that i would think maybe not it could be for something else all right so let's go ahead and take this off i got four bolts i guess i should have showed you that huh and those are 2.5 millimeter hex wrench size bolts on there i believe there's the same m4 if it's following everything that's going on on the other side and if you see any scratching on here that's me it didn't come out of the box that way i want to make sure you guys didn't think that that's how it came out of the box and that yes i am the culprit there and that happens to stuff sometimes with the srg because i'm moving it around so much and mounting it unmounting it and doing all that crazy stuff for reviews so let's go ahead and pull these off i'm gonna start with my two and a half i'm going to kind of move it to the edge here a little bit so i can get to these bottom ones easily they shouldn't be too tight i would imagine yeah there we go not too bad no reason to put loctite on this i guess because if you ever have to service it you don't want to have to heat things up with all those electrical components in there i wouldn't want to anyway here we go all right so we got that loose now we'll take our other wrench and see if i can get this off without any dramas there we go wow that's a long bolt all right so this is an m4 flathead and it seems to be a stainless steel unit see what the magnet says yep see it hardly sticks flapping around in there so these are stainless steel units no doubt let me get the other three out now if you saw push this forward because yeah i don't want to hang it off the side with the cover coming off that'd be a very bad idea i think what i'm going to do is turn this let me look down first and see where my wires are okay i'm going to stand this up on the front of the shaft where the quick release is shouldn't do any damage doing that then i'm going to show you guys the inside i have a close-up camera over here i can show you this the wires are on the bottom back here so i'm going to gently lift it and rotate it like this there we go all right so there we can see the electronics in here and yeah first thing no encoder sitting on the back of this no resolver it looks like to be like so many things in magic their own custom design so what they have here is it looks like to be a magnet let me let's see i'm going to use these pieces here and these are very thin metal little grabber thingies and yeah so you can see that that's a magnet on the end of that and this is the motor shaft that runs the whole length of the motor the stator whatever you want to call it where the magnets are located and then we have the coils and the windings around inside the housing here now if i move this you can see this is not moving see how that screw stays there so if we have it mounted though it's the other way around the shaft is moving and this is not moving i wanted to show you is this piece here sitting right above this magnet right here see this little chip here so that's the position sensor chip little ast unit there that they're using to read the magnetic field on this magnet here as it's turning and taking that information obviously and using it for motor control so yeah yeah again here we are with sim magic's got their own way of doing things apparently instead of you know the normal stuff you see on server motor got some big capacitors in here probably i would imagine for some smoothing and yeah not i could take this out but i don't see any real reason to it's very clean board you can see we have a lot of service mount components the usual suspects here you know capacitors resistors and some other integrated circuit boards so yeah very clean i think what do you guys think very well done there so yeah i just want to see what was you know they were using here as far as position in control so they can control the motor properly for the direct drive force feedback so that's all there is to it not a whole lot to this one right so what i'll do is go ahead and button this back up and when we actually i think this is it this is finished to look inside there's nothing else to see i'm not going to completely disassemble the motor no sense in doing that you could though you see these four bolts up here we could just take this whole case apart but yeah it's just an electric motor at the end of the day just like all servo motors right now we're going to look at different ways we can get our alpha mini mounted there are a set of four holes that are m6 tapped on the bottom and they are 67 millimeter centers this way and 80 this way so it's a simple matter of taking a plate or whatever you're going to use to mount this to wood you know whatever you're going to do and drill this pattern into it and then you can put your m6 bolts through that whatever it is and cinch it down tightly that should give you a pretty good solid base i would imagine especially if you had a nice flat deck mount that's metal and yeah you bolt this down with four bolts i don't think you're going to have any problems with it flexing between the mount part now of course how you have your mount set up on your cockpit's a different story right so we also have a couple of holes on the side here and these are 50 millimeter centers and you can put a make your own bracket up or something and again m6 holes do what you want to there or you can order the bracket set that comes for the alpha mini from sim magic when you get your wheel base right and this is pretty cool bracket system it's very clean typical of what we see from sim magic on the finish everything looks good and got a nice black finish to it here a little notch cut out for i guess for some styling cues there each one has its own label still screened on here this is for the right side and this is for the left side and how we're going to mount this they give us eight of these m6 bolts and they are eight millimeters deep they are flat heads to fit in our countersunk holes that are on the brackets we have this bracket that's going to be the angle adjustment bracket and also has a flange on it to mount to whatever service you're going to mount it to they do provide you with some m8 bolts and these are pan head or button head whatever you want to call them and they fit in here like this so this is a good way to mount it to another metal deck or something or to profile it we got a 40 series profile here let's get this out of the way they give you with your kit these 40 series spring ball t-nuts nice none of that uh leaf spring stuff here or just a free-floating one so they give you some nice tea nuts but of course they're going to fit in the profile channels of 40 series again this is a 40 series this would work also in a 45 series the t-nut would not be as secure in the channel but you could still cinch it down properly so it would work in a 45 too then we would take this and set it here and of course take our button head over here it's still in this bracket put it through the bracket and we can mount it right there like that and we have one in the front and one about and you can move it sideways and you even have some range removing it this way too so it's nice they actually thought of that somebody might want to mount this to some profile all right well we're not going to be doing it that way we're going to be doing it just with the side brackets here i'm not going to mount anything i'm going to be using a front mount which i'm going to cover in the mounting also let's see this is the right so we're looking we're going to work on the left side here so we'll use the left and again these brackets are also countersunk for our angle adjustment and you have to put this on first and this is the right side i'm going to put over here now how you tell the difference well they're labeled right first off but you're going to want these two holes here pointing towards the front of the wheelbase where you're going to attach your steering wheel because these are used for the angle adjustment so obviously if i put this here that's not going to work even it wasn't labeled i might be able to figure that out anyway sometimes i get lucky so yeah this one will be the one that we're going to use and of course it's conveniently labeled with the l and this one over here also has an l next to the silkscreen sim magic logo well let me put this on first again i get a couple of these flat edge these are by the way four millimeter is the size of the wrench and they give you a wrench in your pack to use but i'm gonna use these guys or rather this guy that's a three this is a four so let's go ahead and put this up here go ahead and line it up drop my screw in here and get her started leave it a little loose so i can get the other screw in without having to scratch everything up when i move the plate like that there we go so now we have the plate installed we have our two holes here pointing towards the front now it's just a matter of getting this bracket mounted now you only use two bolts for this even though there's two holes in there you might think that you use two holes and you have two bolts here and you have one back here on the pivot that's not the way the system works i'm gonna go ahead and get the pivot installed and i'll show you how that this is going to get started my fingers there go ahead and run her down gotta love these little t-nut or rather t-wrenches and i'm gonna go flat first i'm gonna go ahead and put this first i'm gonna show you the hole and show you the way this is working make sure you loosen this up just a little bit so move freely so we have two holes but they match up in an alternating pattern here the very bottom front one if i'm flat that lines up you can see the hole there now if i want some angle then i can come down watch the back hole first back one see how that lines up there goes so now that lines up with the back hole and then the front one if i want it more angle will line up with the other hole so you get a good look there it is and you alternate back and forth so that gives us a more finite adjustment capability on our angle then if i just head and put this down two if i had two lined up and they were like an angle so that we could put two bolts in at once that's going to limit our angle adjustments to just four here we have one two three we have actually eight different angles that we can adjust this to i would typically run this pretty sure flat because of the cockpit that i have and the way i sit in my cockpit now of course that's going to be very subjective and everybody's going to have a little bit different situation so again let's turn this around so you can see what i'm doing here so again that would listen that's just a hair there we go depends on your cockpit so there we have it now you can also notice that this protrudes off the bottom and the other bracket that i have from sim magic for their m10 did the same thing you know it's all personal preference but i'd like to see if it was flat here maybe far enough down so it this contacts two to give me more surface areas sitting on the plate again that's that's just something that i think will give it a little bit more stability having this sitting flat on a metal plate and then this mounted flat too but then again with the clearance underneath here when it's mounted and when you have everything cinched down tightly i never saw any flex in anything i never felt like it was you know something you wouldn't want to do but i know just for aesthetics i like to see it flat sitting flat but anyway there you go so we would put the other bracket on just like we put this bracket on and then we're done then we go ahead and mount it to where we're going to mount it to either using the t-nuts for profile or just taking our bolts some longer depending on the thickness of the plate you're mounting it to you might need something longer than this to run a nut on the end maybe a nyloc nut on the bottom to keep everything nice and stiff and secure so there we have it that's the mount that you can get from magic when we come back we'll talk about mounting this puppy on a front mount like on a p1x or some other coppers that have those thick front mount plates and that's the way i'm going to mount this one now i'm going to mount the alpha mini to a front motor mount mount system this one is off of p1x but the ones for asr advanced sim racing the ones that i've tested for all-in-one gaming they're pro series they have enough length or space in their slots and these are where we put the bolts in on these front plates so there's enough room in here to cover the spacing of the m8 holes that are in the front flange i'll show you that so we've got m8 holes here and they're also threaded for m8 so we don't need a bolt or a nut on the back unless you want to put one there for extra security it's totally up to you they are through hole on the flange so you can see they come out the back here i can take my little stick here and go through it but on the bottom they're not on the bottom to keep things flat i guess they're not through-hole they're actually going into the case so that means we have to pay attention to the length of the m8 bolt that we'll be using now this is a 20 millimeter m8 bolt and it's not going to be long enough just you can do the math or you can just put it up there and look and see that if i hold this up against there if one flat you can see that barely have maybe five mil sticking up there so that's not going to be enough to make me comfortable with the motor hanging off at that angle so what we're going to do is measure the depth of the hole and see where we're at and i'll use a set of calipers for that and if calipers have this little thing on the bottom then we can take and stick into a hole and see how deep it is so i'm bottom mounting the hole there and now i can just kind of slide this down and it gives me 39.7.6 [Music] and 39.6 so that's what it gives us now just because the holes that deep doesn't mean i have the bolt that i'm going to use can go that deep it depends on how far they tap the threads into the hole and i can see pretty clearly here it doesn't look like let me hold it up here in the light it looks like they're going pretty far down into the thread hole but when i take a this is a 25 millimeter m8 socket head cap if i take that and run it into the hole like so it stops there so you can see that's as far as it's going to go even though i can see threads further down in there it really gets hard to turn there and obviously you don't want to force the issue so if i take a just a measurement here well i know this is 25 millimeters long so i'll just go ahead and pull this out and take a measurement here before i pull it out turn it sideways so it's bottoming out right at 10.3 mil all right so we'll just pull it right back out 10.29 mils where it's bottoming out that means the rest of this and this is a 25 millimeter so about 15 a little over 15 mil would be sticking in in the 10 mil unfortunately won't make it through this this is gonna this is a 15 mil flange on this particular one this is a p1x yeah 15 mil so this is going to give me enough to get in there if i tried to go with something deeper remember i've got 39 or whatever it was the deepness in the hole but the bolt doesn't go that far right the bolt's only going in 15 mil and i'm looking in there i can see threads you know this is going to be hard to show you guys yeah but there's a there's a black part of the thread and then there's a silver part you might see the reflection in there it's hard for me to tell on this little monitor on this camera but you might be able to see some silver threading that goes even deeper but the bolt is actually stopping only 15 millimeters in so it must be a taper in there i'm not sure how they did that but anyway important thing is is figuring out how to get this thing mounted tightly now i have a long bolt here i believe this is 35 40. now this is a 40 millimeter bolt you can see it has a smooth shank on the top part of it and this is going to be too long if i put this let's go ahead and put this flange on here and to do that i'm going to use this piece of maple block because the side mounts are going to hit the table here and won't let it sit flush on top of the motor itself which is exactly what we want it to do so oop take my wood out don't even put it on there drive this way barry there we go all right i always kind of sit this down on top i can look straight down here and see the holes where they're lining up when i move this around and i've got it yeah the holes are going to be inside they're not going to be like sticking halfway out of the edge of this round part here the hole that's cut out there so we got plenty of space to grab onto and i'll be using these washers also so if i take this one which is the 40 obviously that's going to be too long and you think with a whole 30 was it 37 millimeters deep that this would be okay because it's 40 plus 15 yeah it should make it but you can see it's not going down deep enough no way that's going to work so we're going to go with these 25s because that will go down far enough to make me comfortable but i've got enough grip and i'm going to use one that has the washer because obviously the washer takes up some space not much maybe a mill or so yeah one and a half mil on this uh washer so not taking up much space and you can see as i start bolting this in you can see how much i have to go in so if i can get four of these in there like that go ahead and get this one over here across from it started also give you an idea of where it's going to be riding and you can once these are in i usually slide the mount around a little bit to see where the best place is to have the motor mounted now you can also do this with the bracket mounted to the cockpit but it's a little bit more fiddly when you do it that way instead of just taking the whole thing over there and putting it in of course you can do it any way you want to whatever's easiest for you is what's important i'm going to go ahead and get these in there we go i'm going to go ahead and just kind of run this in a little bit see where i'm at it's pretty much even as far as the overhang on the washers and that's really what i'm looking at and i'll show you what i'm talking about here just as i get this tightened down a little bit a little snug on these guys and i'll do a final torque in a little bit you can torque down pretty hard because the socket heads are actually engaging the bracket even though i have a washer on here the washer is all the pressure is not on that thin washer it's actually engaging the bracket material which is what you want you don't want a small head that's not big enough to engage the bracket material around that slot and then just throw a washer on it because that would just pull right through the washer once you torque it down anyway so this is what we have pull this around now we got wheel and bracket but you can see that the washers are hanging just a little bit on the edge i don't know this is showing up proud of the actual flange of the metal the metal flange here because the way it's mounted in there but that's good enough this should make a very solid mount i think i don't have any any worries about that and my wireless sensor is still sitting out there so we should have no problem with that no interference so yeah i think it's looking good so now all we have to do is go over to the rig and get this mounted so when we come back we'll see how that went here's our alpha mini securely mounted to the p1x front mount motor bracket and this is a very solid mount i've got good engagement here on the front i really don't need the washers the button head bolts would be able to engage by themselves but i like to use the washers just for ease of turning when we're torquing down the bolts and i like the engagement that i'm getting on the back from the flange here on the motor to the plate now you can see some air gaps here that's because we're at the extremes of the slots here where the holes cut out in the bracket but not to worry we got some nice engagement down here and across the bottom two at each corner is really all we need and if i put this my hand on the very back of this and try to twist it at all it's not moving nice and stiff and this is the way you want to mount a direct drive wheel if you can because when it's mounted very solidly like this it allows the wheels motor to deliver the best force feedback fidelity that it can and it really can allow you to see the ultimate or the the most performance that you can squeeze out of these things so this will allow me to do that and again i always try to get motors mounted to something solid like this when i'm testing them just so that you know if there's flex in it that's going to dampen the the finer details of the force feedback that the motor is capable of delivering and yeah that's the last thing we want i think to give it a fair test so there it is it's mounted solidly all i have to do now is get in and start driving it and we'll take a look at the controller software that comes from sim magic for this wheelbase all right so i have the alpha manager the latest edition up and this is the controller software we're going to be using to set our settings for the wheel as far as force feedback any of the customizations of that force feedback i'm in the setting tab right now and all the tabs are lined up here on the left and i'm in mechanical setting and this is where we're going to do most of our tuning when we're live tuning or you're in the car running it you can do this and it takes effect in real time so we have first total force over here and of course that's the maximum newton meters of torque that we give the wheel right now default it's at 51. so that's kind of low but i'm sure i'll be running this at 100 percent we'll go down here to wheel inertia and that should add some weight to the wheel when we're turning it if inertia means the same thing in this app as it does in most we have the wheel damper of course that's going to dampen the wheel effects and we also have a smooth level smoothing things out i imagine smooth level and damping will have is kind of like a subset of each other i'm not sure how they have it configured in their firmware but yeah usually they do kind of the same thing so wheel spring that's going to be the resistance when we turn the wheel and friction is just going to be again kind of a weight thing and when we're actually turning the wheel you can see these are the default settings i'm going to start with those in my live tuning game effect if your game supports it this is where you would be setting the game spring inertia friction things like that over here we have the center control and it tells us where the steering wheel is and i'll try to center that up just not easy to do so yeah it's close enough right there but this is where if the wheel's not centered i would center it and then i would press enter right now it's 2.3 center it it will come out to zero simple enough very easy to do wheel angle we can set that in here if a game sometimes the game will over add this and set it at something but we can actually manually set it in here i think and overrate what's in the game sync that simply means that if i set this to 900 then the angle limit will be 900 but if you can see right here i've got 720 in here because i've been messing around with it if i take this first before i do that 900 should do 900 degrees of rotation when i turn this wheel so i'm gonna go ahead and turn it and there's 450 one way and there's 450 the other go ahead and center it back up now that's when it's synced let's say i went for whatever reasons i only want it to go 720 i'll uncheck sync and now it should only go about 360 i believe so let's see what we get here yep 360 one way 360 the other ah pretty cool feature there so i'm gonna go ahead and leave it back on sync though vehicle setting wheel speed uh suspension i haven't used this yet i'm not sure exactly how this is to affect what we feel but i'll mess with it once i get up there wheel speed how fast we're turning it i guess and suspension maybe the effect of suspension on the wheel not sure exactly what that means yet anyway we're going to go in here and i can read the base i can write storage i can save so if i want to save this configuration i would save it and i click save and a little menu pops up and we'll be able to save this as an any file a dot ini file which also means we can open these up and edit them in a text editor if you wanted to do that but it's just saving the settings we've already set over here in the application so yeah unless you really need to do it for some reason or another probably never do that and we just save it and name it whatever we want over here in this line easy enough so let's go over to the calibration now this is where we have some axises and i'm not sure what these x y and z's on the top are four but i know what the r y and z are that's for our analog paddles that are on the wheel so if i take the analog pedals and i'll do that now i'll pull them both in and you can see they're both moving okay as separate paddles and this is if i want to set up a brake and a throttle or something here i could do that but if i take over here in the switch and i turn it over to i believe it's the all the way to the left yeah then it goes to ry and that means i have in dual clutch mode now so i can pull in both clutches i can release the right for a start and then i would go in and let the rest of the clutch out like in a normal dual clutch mode and that's where i could actually set this up and change the whatever wherever i wanted to engage it i could change it in here we also have a testing here so i can press my buttons and you can see the buttons are lighting up and my seven way switch on the right is working eight nine go left or right or the right and i can go left and i can push the button go up or down and this is where you would test all your functionality and everything all the buttons are working i have no problem with the buttons here everything's fine so that's where we do our calibration at now let's go down to the state this tells us what state the wheel is currently in and over here on the system state because it's got the green line i'll go over there real quick and show you it's normal and this will tell you whatever state that you're currently in depending on what you're doing over here on system message tells you the firmware i'm currently on it says 7054 but the firmware that i put in here was 6054. so i'm not sure why it says 70 but there you go software this is version 2.2 of the alpha manager and the shinzon it's in magic technology okay and where voltage is currently 35 volts remember our power supply does put out 36 volts at 6 amp max channel 60 that is for the channel that my wireless wheel is on it's registering it limit hardness this is the stop hardness and the limit is right now is it four which is pretty hard i mean it's like hitting the brick wall but you can change that if you want something softer i'll just go ahead and take the slider and put it down to two and right away yeah it's not as hard it's still hard but it's got a softer landing and not only that it doesn't if you let it sit there and you push on it it'll vibrate a little bit okay because we're at the limit of the brakes yeah it's shaking a little bit on how well that's the video is going to show up but yeah but it's mainly a stop you're never going to hold it there like that at least not normally under racing conditions so yeah that's uh i don't get a vibration yet okay but anyway normally you won't do that but that's where you would set how soft you want that limit to be very simple stuff now let's go down to boot load this is where you would do your updating of your firmware and this will tell you version message selected file is 6054. now i've just did the 6054 firmware update and all you got to do is you go find the latest firmware you have you choose the file download on computer obviously then i would go in and choose the file when i do that i click on choose file well it's actually a hundred percent so you choose file it's already chosen so that's why now it's not doing it then you go over here and click download because i've already done this i'm not going to do it again but i'm going to show you some b-roll of this thing actually uploading the firmware to the wheel base from the computer and you can see it's a percentile kind of thing a little blue bar moving over to the right and then once it's complete we see a hundred percent then you will reboot the wheel and the firmware should change from wherever it was before to the new firmware you've installed so i'm just showing you guys some b-roll of that so pretty simple it worked the first time i didn't have any problems with it so a nice smooth experience there with no problems no dramas which i can appreciate if you've ever tried to update firmware on different other wheels like uh whatever wheel just take your pick it's it's nice to have something just work the first time you don't have to do anything else so there it is that's the alpha manager of course we're going to be spending all of our time over here in the mechanical setting part where we're going to be doing some tuning in a live session which we will get to next i'm going to do some live tuning here and see how this works out for me as far as i'm going to start out at the default on this alpha manager and it is at 50 at total force which is half the force a little bit of smoothing five and i don't know if this is really the default because i just used this data any and on here and it bought up this configuration i already have another configuration i've saved that i'll show you later on let's see how close i can get to it by using this one and yeah so we're just going to get in the car here this is the ferrari 488 gt3 and we're at sebring my favorite bed for this kind of thing because all the bumps and stuff that's going on at this track it really lets you know the wheel is capable of doing and it usually displays any good or not so good traits in a wheelbase when you're using it so let's go ahead and use this configuration here now remember this is mostly what we play with here in eye racing we don't use the game effect because i racing doesn't have any of that if a set of courses i think we could use this but yeah and i race and we don't suspension down here and wheel speed i played a little bit with that wheel speed i couldn't i didn't really couldn't figure out what that was doing but suspension that gives you sharper effects and right now it's sitting at one so i usually keep it there because you turn this up you get more detail but you also get some more artifacts i think over this around the center where it feels a little notchy to me anyway so we're going to get in the ferrari here i got the volume turned down pretty low so that shouldn't cause any problems for us i hope all right let's go ahead and oh my field of view is messed up yeah i was in a single screen mode before i did this let me get back out of here i usually not that far up on the dash obviously and it's nice having these seven ways i can do all this adjustment for my field of view and stuff where i can see my mirror over there and i can see it here it's usually where i have it mirror there mirror there all right and again you can do that to whatever's comfortable with you and makes you quicker consistent laughs what it's all about so let's go ahead and get out on the track okay and default's not going to be that great and it's obviously i don't like it this light it's only should be five newton meters if this is 10 newton meter peak it doesn't feel bad there's detail there for certain i can feel the transitions from the track there i am running it at 25 max force down here though so keep that in mind too but it's very light but i am getting force feedback it's just not as much that i would like to have for trying to connect to you know a slide or something even though yeah i held it there it's just not something i would be driving with but there's enough detail in fact it'll even oscillate on you it's hitting brakes well maybe it won't it's just not enough power there but yeah it's way too light for me but the force feedback is still there so if you don't like a lot of force then you're not used to a direct drive wheel then you might want to start out somewhere around this level but i could barely feel myself going over the transition between the asphalt and the concrete so that's not where i would have this so we are tuning this for me and remember this is all subjective what could be more subjective than this stuff i don't know so i'm first thing i'm going to do is turn this up to 100 and that'll give me the full 10 10 newton meters of force i'm leaving this at 25 i'm going to get out of the car and show you that when i was at five i should have been go here to options i should have been in the wheel force down here should have been at five newton meter but i knew i wasn't going to be driving for that at that strength very long so i just left it at 10. so now we're at 10 newton meter for wheel force i'm at 25 newton meters on max force and of course i can change that on the fly when i'm in the car with my little black box and of course i can go through my different black boxes with my other 7-way switch on this wheel so i really like this wheel all the controls you have here all the functionality i'm going to leave that at 25 newton meter right now i've gone back up to 10 newt meter peak so obviously right away i'm gonna be feeling something different yep now that's more like it now i've got some force and the more force you have as far as newton meters the more detail and the more weight transfer that detail is available to me and what the car is doing because i can feel the inertia in the spring working more in the wheel itself but right now i've got some notchiness around the center which is not uncommon for direct drive wheels and it's almost like if you were driving a rack and pinion equipped vehicle and you needed some lube in the rack or it was wearing out one or the other it just feels notchy around the center when we're doing our transitions the weight transfer in the wheel feels good at this as far as the inertia and friction feels it feels like i'm really steering a heavier car back and forth across the track of course that goes away the faster you go so i'm gonna go ahead and get up to speed here i already don't like what i'm feeling around the center of these settings so we'll go up get the speed get some breaking zones going the dirt corner that felt pretty good but yeah the notchiness around the center is just something that again personal preference i just don't like it i want it as smooth as possible now the good thing news is there is no gap anywhere there's no dead zone around center on this wheel you feel the pressure all the way through the swing some wheels right in the center it's like there's this little gap of no force and this doesn't have that so that's great right out of the box but i'm gonna go ahead and here's what i'm gonna do we're smoothing level five and my suspension is one if i turn that up any higher that just means it's gonna do more detail which probably is gonna make it worse or more pronounced worse is relative depending on who's talking about what they're feeling i'm going to bring up the wheel damper i'm just going to go i know because i've done this already i'm going to take it up to 30 and i have to be careful when i'm using these sliders because this app tends to jump when you're using a slider when you click on the slider line for some reason if you click on either side of that line it wants to jump around and it even jumps as far as down into my bottom screens which makes everything mess up so trying to avoid that while i'm doing this all right we're at 30. so let's go ahead and see how that feels yeah right away i'm already feeling less notchiness around the center i still got plenty of detail i could feel all of that you saw this movement in the wheel it was pretty sharp so i'm not missing any detail at all let's go around this is a very bumpy corner yeah still a little bit too much for me so i'm gonna turn this down i'm gonna not turn it down i'm actually gonna go up to 40 on my damper see how it jumped got to be careful this will mess up my whole video if it jumps down in my other window down there okay so we're at 40 now 10 more points of damping should be noticeable right away go over some bumps yeah yeah definitely the little bit of a ripple or a little notchy feel that i get is definitely less than it was before that's a good bump there coming off that rumble strip when you go inside and come back outside of it gives it a big jolt here on this ferrari all right that feels better still a little bit there so i'm going to go on my smoothing my power's good total force is good i'm not going to mess with that i am going to take my smoothing up to six and see what that does i might go back to suspension over here and do something with that so instead of just having on one all right there's still some there it's not that it's upsetting to me or anything i can drive it this way no problem but if i got it all the way out i got a feeling that i would be losing some detail that i want so it just feels like there's a like something like somebody's got a small rubber mallet and tapping on the center there when you go around it when you get those jolts so i want that jolt delivery because i'm at full power too so obviously everything's being amplified to the max well my smoothing level's back to three i don't know how that happened i'm just going to take it up seven maybe that's why i was feeling it huh sometimes these things move i don't know why maybe it's my trackball and i actually hit it and it moves okay all right so we're at seven on smooth left dampening at 40. still at one on suspension already yeah yeah that's what it was it was a three no wonder was feeling weird all right so we're back at seven now yeah now this is feeling better this is feeling more like what i think i would have it at there's still a little bit very faint notchiness around the center but it's almost all gone now and i'm still getting enough detail i believe i'll know when i get down here that it's the detail that i want to feel in the car to allow me to control it properly yeah that's good i was good and sharp through there see what my transition feels like going across this concrete good see how the wheel moved there it moved but it was a smooth heavy move not a notchy snappy little move i want things to be smooth it feels more analogous to me when it's that way but i still want detail yeah i know we want it all don't we so yeah go through this section that's feeling pretty good good rumble across the strip there that's good let's try this one a little transition good there do my little cut through here barely legal cut through the rumbles yeah that was good sharp coming off of it but not notchy sharp good rumbles here yep excellent there i'm really liking this where it's at right now got a little bit of wheel friction in there at ten smoothing seven now a little bit of inertia at ten i suppose i could tweak around with that a little bit but it's almost like when you get to a point where you're feeling it feeling what the car is doing and you're able to react to it and catch things when they go wrong like that you kind of want to leave it alone because this that's how you go fast able to quickly do the input corrections you need to do in a car steering when we're racing so that we can be consistent and we become familiar with what it's doing yeah that felt good through there yeah that's what i like you can really feel what the car suspension is doing when we're coming through these rough spots and when you're turning in the rough spots you can really get out of sorts quickly good see i could feel that right away the way it was getting light in the front and correct for it that little slide there and that's what again that's why we get these direct drive force feedback wheel bases for because they're quick enough and powerful enough to let us feel all that yeah yeah i got no problem with this here yes it's smooth around the center now just a faint bit of notch left if and i have to feel for it to get it to see it again or feel it again just a faint bit there but i really like what i got right now now this is very subjective someone else gets in here and drives us and goes oh my god this is horrible so you have to tune it to your own liking and just to check i'm going to save this i'm going to save this as i'm going to do two because i already got one that i saved for eye-raising here so i'm going to make this a 2. get my gloves out of the way all right we'll save that as two and now i'm going to watch this as i load the one i had before and see what's different so we've got 110 40 7 0 10 and we've saved it so i'm gonna load final one again yeah all right so i got a little more inertia in here i got a little bit less smooth but i might see my dampening's gone up though so less smoothing but more damping and that's you know you have to just one affects the other when you adjust it so let's see what that remember if that recalls to me that what i wanted before and how it compares i got a little bit more inertia in there inertia is when you're turning it when you stop try to stop it from turning spring also comes into play in that field too the spring is the spring back where it keeps pushing back against you when you're turning it well that feels pretty good what was that smooth level is down to six and we're up to 50 a little bit more inertia in there that feels pretty good yeah that was smooth but detailed again the change was i went up higher on the wheel damper and came back on the smoother and everything out well it was the five more points of inertia there too but other than that it looks like it's the same i'm happy with this yeah okay so that's what i had when i was messing around with it before spending some time just feeling what the wheel was capable of doing all right so again with the caveat this is very subjective stuff at least it'll give you an idea well i'm able to control the car and keep it from sliding out of control so that's that's the main thing to do there also i like what i'm feeling here i could probably get some oscillation now let's see how that works get some speed up here and i'm gonna there you go see the oscillation now when i hit the brakes look at the oscillation now if i was on a smooth tarmac then yeah it would be a lot less of that this corner in here at sebring is notorious for all the bumps it has and when you're on hard on the brakes and you're hitting all those bumps at the same time you get all that weight transfer at the front you're really getting some shocks through the steering system in a car and that's why it's a lot harder turn to make it speed than a lot of people think when they see cars racing at sebring because of all these bumps wanting to throw you out just like 17 back there one's kind of like that but not quite as severe but it'll still throw you out of sorts pretty quickly but yeah like this i can barely feel a little bit of that notchiness just barely though i had to really feel for it that was there before when i had the original data in there but yeah but it did take me some smoothing and some uh wheel damper to get that out didn't it so i'm happy with this i'm able to get to where i need to be to control the car end of the day and that's what all this stuff is about being able to control the car so that you can put in your consistent laps and get used to feeling what every turn feels like and where you need to be in that turn based on how much you can feel through the wheel as far as details in your force feedback and braking is very important because you can feel the front end getting light when you start to lose the grip so this little wheel heel there's this alpha mini is really doing a pretty good job 10 newton meters i'd like to have more power obviously that's just me but i think for anyone who especially somebody's coming from a belt drive or cog or a gear drive type wheel this is going to be plenty of torque for them other wheels are like 50 did the alpha regular alpha's 15 i would like to test one of those because i think that's probably more like this week 20 is probably the sweet spot for me but i've been doing this a long time and i've built up some muscle to where i'm able to you know that's just the forces that i feel good with it feels more analogous to me when i have a bit more force the usual wheel i run goes up to 25 newton meters but i usually do not run it at 25 i'm usually somewhere between that and 20 and depending on the car and the track i might even go lower than 20 new meters again but it's good to have the overhead if you need it instead of need it and not have it it's a smooth theory for most things but yeah we're pretty good here pretty good so those are my settings for i racing and this is the ferrari 488 again we're at sebring again i would be changing this if i was going to an lmp car or you know one of the f1 cars something like that you're gonna you're gonna play with this a little bit and get it to feel like you're really controlling the car that's always been my goal do i feel like i'm really controlling the car that i'm driving and of course i can't drive these cars in real life so i really don't know do i nobody does unless you drive them but a real car we got g-forces when we're driving them so we don't need all this force feedback simulation we need it so that we can understand what's going on with the car in a day that's really the bottom line can you feel what the car is doing and encounter in your wheel and yeah this one you can do it i really don't have anything except for that i'd like to see that notchiness go away completely i can still feel a little bit of it when i'm doing this but only when i'm doing this feeling for it it's pretty smooth now and again no dead zones so that's very important too so i don't have a lot to complain about here except for that i guess i'll pull i'll complain about that and another thing i'd like to point out here is the wireless i don't know how well you're going to see this through the video but you can see the little green light down here with the monitors pulled in tight like this the way i like them they're at 60 degrees so when i'm looking through turns it's like a natural thing this line really disappears you really don't even notice it when you're driving i mean look at all these other lines we have in here we got the a-pillars and all this other stuff going on so i've got them close in though you can see how far it my hand is like uh i guess it would be like three inches you know maybe 70 millimeters between the shifters in my hands here so i make sure i don't hit the screen obviously but pull it in tight like this gives you that surround feel that you're looking through naturally but if i have a wireless wheel that has an antenna sticking on the back of the motor back there then now i've gotten the monitors dropped down i've got this plate in the way of it and you can see that that would not be as efficient as this here because now it doesn't really matter because i can still see it my wheel transceiver over here that's behind the wheel that i showed you before can see it so that's just something i wanted to point out yeah this is definitely an optimal way to do a wireless solution i don't understand why you would not do this because of everything that we're doing now if you're just a vr user of course you have to worry about that stuff but yeah look at all this stuff in front of the antenna that would be back on let's say a semi cube on the back back there which obviously is not helping it right so there it is we got it tuned i like what i have and we'll just move on i'll probably just go ahead and show you guys some video and be actually driving in different conditions with this wheel the gt4 and the round wheel some dirt maybe or something but just some basic driving footage at speed where i can focus and concentrate on what i'm doing and see if i can get the same lap times i normally do so we're at the ring in iracing and we're in the ferrari 488 gt3 again keeping the car the same but these are very different track this one feels silky smooth compared to sebring even though it has its own fair share of some bumps here and there and some heavy curbing i was able to get another setting here i kept the well i'm 100 already so i couldn't go any higher in the torque but in a smoother track you feel more nuances than you do in a track like sebring where you're constantly getting hammered by all the bumps so i felt the nuances here that changed the way that i wanted the wheel to feel i didn't like i felt it was a little bit sharp on the impacts because it was so smooth everywhere else that you notice it more so i went up in the damping and i went up in the smoothing i wanted the damping as high as i think 65 and the smoothing another 0.27 to get the feel that i wanted to feel like i was able to understand what the car suspension was doing and react to that and the grip of the car at the same time now being 10 newton meters this is way below what i normally run and i have to take that into account and you should too when you hear my opinions and statements about it yeah it's i was chasing something that you can't get with this wheel as far as going in a higher newton meter level so you have to maintain your perspective correctly so at 10 newton meters max i think i was squeezing the max performance i could get out of this wheel the good news is i was able to get enough settings out of it or they have enough settings in the controller app that alpha controller app that i was able to get it to where i thought was the maximum for it at max torque that i was able to use so yeah i did have to dampen it out and smooth it out a little bit to get just more of a universal feel for the whole track on everything i was doing in the track when i'm running hard and paying attention what i'm doing so yeah and again this is all very very subjective stuff don't let anybody a youtube reviewer like me or anybody else in a forum or something tell you what you need to have in your direct drive wheel because everybody's different everybody wants to feel things differently and yeah you just have to work with it yourself the trick is having a wheelbase or a system that has enough adjustability in it that you can get it there and i think most would be pretty happy with the adjustability in this wheel if i could get it to where i felt comfortable with it and was getting pretty much the same times i normally do i think most others could too it's just again just like anything else it might take a little bit of time to get it exactly where you want it now i had the lighter wheel on that segment there and i went ahead and put i don't show me myself driving here but i put this heavier wheel on the round wheel from sim magic and this wheel is actually a pound about a pound and a half heavier than that gt wheel you just saw and when i put this wheel on and ran the ring right away i noticed a difference so i'm here i am i'm going back the other way now i'm taking some smoothing out i'm taking some damping out so that yeah because it's a much heavier wheel the mass for when you put it on this motor it notices right away the motor does and it just dampens everything out because of the inertia and the mass of the wheel changes so you just adjust for it and i was able to do that and then i wanted to get over into some dirt and sling it around a little bit the wheel spin it back and forth just feel how it reacts to those situations and the rally stuff yeah you don't get much detailed feedback here in the rally stuff because the suspension on these cars is so soft to begin with you don't get the same thing you do like in a obviously a gt style car or even an f1 car even worse you know they're even tighter suspensions but i wanted to see how it acted here in the dirt too and i was able to get another setting here i didn't have to change much actually because of the lack of the force feedback fidelity you get in these conditions didn't have to change too much you know again i'm already at maxing it out as far as the newton meters so there's not a lot to change there either because i'm certainly not going to back it down because i could handle it anyway somebody else though might want to take some of it back out you know so they can sling it around a little easier depending on which wheelbase you're coming from which type of technology you're coming from you're coming from a gear driven or a belt driven wheel this is going to be a big eye opener for you as any direct drive wheelbase will be the amount of force feedback fidelity you can get out of these things is just much much better than anything that's belt driver gear drive and most people i think would agree with that statement so anyway i don't want to keep this too long again the settings were pretty much the same as when i was doing the live driving session except for increasing or decreasing the damping depending on how heavy the wheel it was that was attached to the motor and that's not uncommon for any motor that you're using be it belt direct drive or gear whatever the heavier wheel you put on it will dampen things down a little bit and you have to adjust accordingly so yeah i'm happy with what i can get out of this wheel i think the alpha controller software has enough settings to get you where you need to be to feel like you're actually controlling the car and really that's where we need to be that's the goal right that's why we get these wheels we want to be able to feel like we're controlling the car at the end of the day [Music] [Applause] [Music] final thoughts on the alpha mini directorie force feedback wheelbase out of the box the alpha mini looks very much like the regular alpha wheel base sporting the same clean lines finish and fitment will stand with the best here the connections for usb power can bus and b stop are located on the side of the wheelbase i did not have any issues with the cables interfering with my mounting solution although others may have a more confined space to mount their wheelbases and it could be an issue i would like to see these connectors located on the back of the wheelbase housing and while they're at it i think it would be more convenient for the user if the power switch was also located on the back of the housing instead of on the power cord this wheelbase uses what i call an nrg style quick release system as do all of syn magic wheel bases using a ball bearing to dimple seating arrangement this is a solid qr system that did not flex in my testing sim magic does make an adapter for those who wish to use their own qr solution with the sim magic wheelbases the wheelbase side adapter has contact pads that deliver 5 volts to the attached wheel it is a wireless inductive arrangement so there's no worry about twisting wires when turning the wheel on the front of the mounting flange of the wheelbase there is a wireless solution deployed it looks very clean and should provide a more consistent and strong wireless connection than some of the other wireless solutions out there today i never had any issues with the wireless connection during the time i had under testing the internals of the wheelbase look to be of high quality with a clean looking layout there are several different ways to mount this wheelbase there are m6 holes tapped on the bottom and side of the housing you can also front mount this wheelbase using the provided m8 tapped holes on the motor flange sim magic has an available side mount solution that looks good and provides ample range of adjustment the latest alpha manager tuning software provided me with enough adjustment range to get a very good feel for what the car i was driving was doing which is essential to driving a car in a consistent manner with a maximum torque of 10 newton meters it should provide most racers with ample power to get a clear feel for a car's actions allowing them to feel like they are actually controlling the car as of this video's release the price of the alpha mini comes in at 500 this is supposed to be an introductory offer that has already been running it will end at the end of august 2021 after that i have no idea what the price will be for this alpha mini from sim magic i'm barry rowland thanks again for watching the simracing garage channel don't forget to hit the subscribe button and if you would like to help support what i do here at the srg visit my website at simracinggarage.com

Channel: Sim Racing Garage

Views: 125,882

Keywords: sim racing garage, sim racing, racing, assetto corsa, iracing, sim racing cockpit, gaming, fanatec, simulator, online racing, racing simulator, simracing, forza, rfactor, thrustmaster, racing wheel, simulation, vr, f1, gran turismo, shifter, simxperience, HPP, Heusinkveld, Sim Lab, Logitech, racing pedals, motion simulator, PS4, XBOX, Xero Play, RF2, computer racing, IMSA, WEC, gamer, nascar, scca, triple monitor, oculus, racing seat, sparco, momo, D-BOX, bodnar

Id: wPe628qP5n8

Length: 88min 52sec (5332 seconds)

Published: Sat Aug 14 2021