VRS DirectForce Pro DD Wheel System Review

[Music] welcome to another edition of the simracing garage I'm Barry Rowland in this episode we'll be reviewing the long-anticipated direct force Pro wheel system from the guys at Virtua racing school sporting the tried and true Mitch 20 Newton meter servo motor that is custom spec to VRS is design requirements and providing a nice simple to use wheel tool for tuning duties this looks to be a very promising direct drive force feedback system time to put it through the SR G's review process and see how it does so so that's good to it now let's take a closer look at what you get in the kit first let's take a look at the controller box itself which is a very small unit this thing comes in at 100 180 millimeters as far as the width this way which would be about 7 inches and 160 this way and that comes out about about 6 and a quarter and of course it's only about 2 inches tall which would be about 50 mil yeah 50 mil so again a very small box but a very nicely done box here it's got a good professional feel and finish to it when you bring it when you first unpack it so you get is like I said some things when you take them out of the box they radiate quality and that's what this does they've done a good job with this it is a steel metal type of enclosure and of course we have a logo on it and you can see there's a lots of ventilation for the electronics inside we have ventilation on the top we have it on the sides and yeah so that should be plenty I suppose this actually has a 400 watt power supply in it and also the other supporting electronics for driving a servo motor and yeah got a logo on the front and on the bottom and we've got some rubbery feet and some more vents and I'll show you the label I can get to breaking Rita there my bright lights alright direct force Pro so on back is where we do all the connecting and nice connectors here you can see we have gold plated pins here for the power plug and over on the encoder we've got a 15 pin plug and we have this emergency stop and right now the emergency stop has a loop plug and that plug has two wires in it you can see them there is creating a loop so that it just stays on and without this and when it won't work properly so you have to have this plugged in for it to work and we'll talk about that later two USB B type port the usual stuff we see here a nice little reset button and we have a hundred and fifteen volt mains plug here for North America and of course our switch right then you know very compact very simple you know not much to to look at as far as what your gonna be hooking it to there are some threaded holes here so you could I don't know if you could use that for a mount or not because it's only right there I guess if you were hanging it or something you could do that but I would think that you would need more screws threaded holes in here to mount it which if you have a thread kit you could always put them in yourself if you need it to but yeah you could mount this I mean it's small enough it's guessing a little bit of weight to it though because of the power supply and stuff in here I imagine but we'll do a once we get to the look inside we'll be able to see this better so yeah I like this box nice and compact and of course we got the midge motor and this is a small midge as we've been we've been calling them for years which is a max of a 20 Newton meter on this midge motor and they actually have midge make this motor encoder setup special for them and there's some electronics on the back here and I probably pull this off and show you guys that once we get to that point but there's a couple extra sensors in here and switch it or a switch in a sensor I believe on the encoder that helps them better control the motor itself right so yeah midge motor what could more could you ask for this thing is I can't think of anything that's more tried and tested and proven to be a very robust motor in fact I've got another one over here that I've had for years and it's runs great so yeah I'm sure maybe there's a few of them it broke now somewhere but we've been using these motors in the direct drive type of configuration for years I can't imagine how many tens of thousands of hours people have have on these for direct drive use so yeah I think that's a smart move on their part to go with a known proven motor and just not mess around with other motors plus I really like that they went with this servo motor instead of a stepper motor right but well again we'll get a little more closer look at that we also get these cables now these cables are custom made by a third-party company they've explained to me and we what they do is they get the connectors they come with the Midge motor from the factory and then they send these connectors off to someone else at their party cable manufacturer that custom makes these they're supposed to be some ferrite chokes in here and some shielding they call it double shielding for the all the cable here and so we'll take a look at that this is the power cable and that's where shielding isn't usually the most important and yeah so we'll take a look at that once we take a look closer look at these cables themselves unless it's really easy to pull this one one let's do it now yeah let's see what we got let's see here take a little cable cable off oh yeah there we go about that we have a shield cable you can see the metal shield there and we have a wire attached to that well that's showing up in this light if I get this name to focus alright so there it is and that's going over to the ground pin and if you also see in there you see that little ring looking thing there that is actually a ferrite core or choke as we like to call them on the parts of that wire so it's shielded there so the other side of this wire should have a shielded wire also inside of it attaching to the ground part right so we have a ground on all the shielding throughout this cable you know it's very cool that they're doing this more and more manufacturers need to start doing this on their simracing peripherals I mean we're paying a lot of money for the accessories and there's still manufacturers who leave their electronics just hanging out in the breeze you know maybe a piece of plexiglass on top it or something like that and that's really not good for even just having a direct drive motor it's an electric motor and it produces EMI and RFI and it can't affect things and yeah somebody's manufacturers pedals and stuff like that they're still just putting their like this don't get it their circuit board just hanging out so it can be affected very easily and load cell circuits are more prone it seems to me than potentiometer ones to the EMI effects of electric motors and you know that much as you pay for those kind of things you expect to see this kind of stuff some kind of a shielding or at least an effort for shielding I think the effort for shielding in some manufacturers they throw a piece of wire in there and say hey if you have any problems put this to run this to a ground that's kind of silly really but as more people get into motion that's going to be even more of a problem that manufacturers gonna have to deal with if they don't address it manufacturing ok enough about any map we have two connectors over here and one is for the power we saw this will be the female part of the power plug you see this all gold-plated - I meant to mention that on the box and even there 15 pin unit here is a gold-plated unit very nice indeed again going the extra mile here I think the cables feel very substantial in hand and I don't think let's see if there's anything on here that says it's 22 gauge okay so we got 22 gauge strand wire in here for each of the wires running through here there's like a max of about 300 volts that's a lot of volts okay so what else we get this is an accessory you don't get this with your kit but it's nice now this is obviously a hub adapter and we're gonna need some weight obviously to take the input out of this shaft and put it on our steering wheel and this is what this does and you guys may have seen stuff like this before this is an aluminum CNC cut aluminum anodized unit black very nice it kind of dresses up the image a little bit - instead of just having the silver stuff out there this that will slip all the way on there like that and yeah I kind of like the way that looks right so not much to this it's a clamping style so this you can see the slot in here that runs the whole length we're gonna have two bolts in here that we tighten down and it will tighten down on to the shaft now before you install something like s or any hub really not just this one now you want to make sure you clean this shaft off good with some rubbing alcohol or some degreaser that will clean it off good because you want this to grab well and of course run do the same thing inside of here because there might be some manufacturing lubricant or something in there I don't know though but after anodizing I wouldn't think they would put more to lube o in it just for the heck of it you're already got the alcohol out or whatever so nice little thing this is actually fifty dollars now you can get other clamps and this is a 22 millimeter shaft by the way all the the Mitch 20 small majors have that 22 that's and that hasn't changed I measured it but you can see on my older midge here I have a more of an industrial looking shaft clamp and you can still order these I think and get some one emai or some other shops in different places sell them and the clamp itself is this part right here you're still going to need this adapter though that has a 70 millimeter pattern on it alright and has holes in it so that these four bolts here don't interfere with anything so you're gonna need something like that to adapt it and these these run anywhere I've seen them like $20 to 25 or even a little more for this adapter so 25 for one of these or $50 for one of these you know and considering the whole kits only $7.99 I think I would be even personally I would get this one because I think it just looks a lot better once it's on there and of course it's got the threaded pieces in there right for your your screws to go into away you can see that threading in there is tapped and it's a 70 millimeter pattern this is not threaded so you have to run some bolts and nuts and things on it so again a little bit more convenient and you pay a little bit more for that in a better looking thing - I think as far as aesthetically speaking alright so let's get our motors all the way here look at those again a little bit now you also get an accessory here you don't get this this is necessery this is the mount for the motor I think it goes like this with the flanges would be on the outside kind of like this right and then we can hold it still we've got the front mount plate that comes in like this alright and it's got these in the bottom so we can adjust our angle right so it'll just fit in here like this or in between these guys really so if I can do this without dropping them making love engine noise there we go something like that right and we do get a hardware package to attach all that right here nice black bolts right even the nuts are black and the washers are black in here so again just a little touches like this that kind of stand out against some of the other kits that I've seen before and this has a VRS anyway you can see that logo cut into it on the side on the top pieces so it'll be kind of like this like that I guess yeah kind of going down all right and again this is powder coated I believe this is steel and let's find out where's my steel measurer yes steel so yeah good steel plate here and just a good-looking kit really from what I can see so far alright let's talk about the USB cable that comes with it and this is a trip light which is some of the better type of USB cables out there and it has the gold-plated well you can see this ends on both ends iPhone or USB be in her USB a very nice only thing that I would like to see change both now they actually told me they've tested these cables and and found a cable that met their standards and that's great I'm glad they went to the the extra effort to do that so they went with a trip light brand but I would still like to see some ferrite chokes on both ends of this for the EMI and I have ferrite trucks I got a bag I'll box off from different sizes so I usually put those on there and they're cheap enough you can buy like a sorted size kit for like I don't know 20 bucks and you'll have like 50 of them in there so yeah I'll probably put some chokes on this cable myself right last but not least you get our power cable and this one has the usual 3-3 slot connector on the end of it and but because it's came from Europe I have the European plug which is no big deal I have a lot of these plugs for 115 volt or cables rather so no big deal there but yeah this came from Europe and currently well as I'm shooting this video the 22nd of May 2020 they are not shipping to North America yet but should be by the end of this month or the first week or two in June they'll be shipping these units in North America and the connector on that power cable will be the correct one for North America all right so that's all we get in this kit and yeah it's pretty complete I think I'm not really wanting for anything although you do have to get the bracket extra and if you want this hub you'll have to order that extra which takes the price up to from $7.99 to $8.99 or 900 bucks right so what we'll do next is get to our closer look individual stuff and like like look inside and things like that so let's take a look inside of this controller box as you saw before in when I was showing you everything including the kit this is a very small box to do what it does it has plenty of ventilation on it as you can see the innards inside of it from all the holes here and we even have ventilation coming in the bottom and on the sides we have some very nice gold-plated power connector right there a 15-pin over here our East op again which is has to be in which is just a loop back if you will little loop plug so this will work our USB be our reset switch mains power in and of course our switch for turning it on and off so now we're taking the screws out let's see what they're doing in here get this out like this there guys okay nice heavy metal this is like steel powder coated steel you know steel and has a nice powder coat finish all over it including the insides except where these screws are going in alright so here we have first off the power supply is sitting back here and this is a Meanwell power supply if I can get that in there so you guys can get a look at it see the model number there okay so this is a 400 watt power supply it does 48 volts out at 8.4 amps and yeah using a Meanwell power supply is always a good idea they're kind of the industry standard for power supplies for quality type of power supplies and of course this is a fan 'less unit so there's no fan in here and we can see there's a very large 400 volt capacitor hiding under there all right we've got some more capacitors over here on the output and there's the output lugs there for the power to go to our controller board our driver board if you will and you see those capacitors in there the smoothing capacitors and as the power comes out and goes into our board then we have some more smoothing capacitors over here right where our power output is we also have this big gold resistor and this is a Dale 50 watt you guys the other breaking resistor so yeah nicely done on the power supply you know there's no fan so this is a very quiet controller box it'll never spool up on you so that's nice to know and this is their custom controller driver board and I'll get you a closer look over here you can see the down here in the corner or up there in the corner rather it says VRS direct force Pro and there's the version number of this board very nice and neat very tidy inside here I like the way the connectors you know they've got all the shielding in here everything's done as far as you should see in a professional product when you take it apart and yeah it's just well done everywhere all the terminations are good you know they've done all these like they should be done all of our connectors everywhere including the mains up here the connector block going to the board it's cool little connector block there you see this little orange thing on the back that's the locking mechanism for pinching down these wires inside the block so yeah very cool we got some jumpers in here you don't need to use jumpers when you up there update the firmware on this board it's just you can do it through the application that we're gonna see when we get over there and we're driving it so yeah very tidy professionally done board I really like this and it's so small I mean this thing is I can't believe how small they've gotten these things these days I mean it used to be you know big boxes and we had two people to run these two these 20 Newton meter small midges over here so yeah they've really come a long way with this and they've done their homework like I said before it took him like a year and a half to bring this thing to market so yeah I think it shows they really took their time and got it right I mean I can't find anything to complain about in here so yeah there is our look inside of the direct force pro controller box let's take a closer look at the midge motor that VRS is using in their direct drive system now I have another midge over here that I've had for several years and been using it in different configurations as far as for you know osw and a couple of their custom boards and yes it's kind of an industry standard it has been for a long long time these midge what we call twenty or small midge motors and they are proven again I think VRS was smart to go with this because it's a proven you know it's got $10,000 on it as far as how long people have been using these things in a direct drive configuration so there is a difference here there's only one difference actually between these well two actually there's a model number difference here but yeah other than that they're exact same they have twenty millimeter shet I would rather 22 millimeter shafts on both of them so anything that would fit on the older as far as a hub adapter or a shaft clamp whatever II want to call it will fit on this one too so first thing I'm gonna show you is the new one the VRS is head SPECT by midge and they're not light motors so I'm going to show you the label there and you can see it says DFP or drive force Pro and there's the model number alright and this is a 2015 edition so I have a later edition over here actually so that's really the only difference between these two motors I'll show you the the one on this old Mitch that I have and this is uh what's the number on this this is 2008 I think I was 2015 and other than that you can see the model number is different here so they have changed the model numbers a little bit but there is no DFP on this one of course right so that just lets us know that again VRS has this one SPECT out exactly like they need to have a SPECT out to have it in their system and we're going to next take a look inside which is basically just pulling the encoder cover off and see what's hiding underneath there now let's take a look inside the mid motor I've already taken the screws out of the encoder cover here and remember we have some wires in here obviously because we have the data plug sitting up here so we have to be careful when we open it up and there's a rubber gasket also that tends to stick to the housing I just want to be careful to make sure all that comes loose so you don't have any issues and I'll just kind of rotate this out of the way so we can see what we have here alright so the first thing we see is the bist encoder and I'm gonna go ahead and get you guys a little bit closer here so we can see what's going on so this is the Bitsey encoder 4.1 something million resolution so again a very good encoder on this now there's actually two different things here that you won't see in a regular mich motor and hence the D F P designation on this motor from midge first thing you see over here is an air packs thermostat basically what it's doing is reading the temperature of the motor alright and that's these are safety measures this or that they've actually gone and had midge add to these motors over here we have a switch and this is a thermal switch and it's got this this epoxy or something on top of it basically what this does is at a certain predetermined temperature I'm not sure what that is for this motor but this switch will actually there's two pieces in there two metal pieces that are making contact right now and at a certain temperature those metal pieces will actually expand enough to break that contact and when that happens the motor will shut down so this keeps it from having any kind of thermal overload again a safety a safety thing if you will that is normally not on the Mitch motor so yeah thermostat and a thermal switch over here are the two things you won't see in a normal midge motor so yeah other than that yeah not much to see here just got some wires coming out of here it's the extra wires of course from these two extra safety measures so yes nice to know that they're in there huh so not much else to see obviously on the inside a look on a Mitch motor so we'll just move on to the next segment alright guys just a short little clip here to show you we have everything mounted up everything is nice and firmly mounted up because you know how stiff these people when exes are with these motor mounts everything's cabled in good and it's kind of looping under the monitors back here and going up to a little piece that I have up here from sim labs that you can bolt to your profiles that I use a piece of velcro there to kind of manage my cables a little bit still a long ways away from great cable management but that's just what I have to live with here at the srg because I'm changing things around so much right so there's our controller box and we'll go around have a little peek at that this little guy sitting here and there is a little bit of warmth coming off these holes in here but yet not hot it by any means it's just kind of nice because it's cold in here my air-conditioning so my hands can detect a little bit of heat there but that's of course the power slot yet supply is running now and we'll go ahead and come around the side here and yeah very neat and tidy the way they did this you know the cable connectors and nice metal pieces as we saw before just everything goes together so well we've got a green and yellow light on our East op loopback plug which means everything is golden and of course we have our USB in our mains over here yeah really not much to it so all we have to do now is get in and start driving this thing here is the VRS wheel tool and we'll be using this to obviously tune the force feedback of our wheel base and it's a very simple looking tool which is kind of a welcome sight to me personally and don't get me wrong it's nice to have a slew of different filters and adjustments to make on a wheel if if that's what you're into and tweaking to the the last little bit but you know there's a lot of people out there who don't want to have all those options and want something a little bit simpler as far as their GUI and this is what that is so of course the wheel itself has to be able to deliver a good force-feedback experience with less effects or less control or tuning options so we'll see how that works once we're driving it right so first thing we've got to BRS direct force Pro wheel base here is a drop-down menu probably I'm guessing because there might be future hardware developments from VRS so we'll just have to wait and see what happens there we've got some tabs here reload our settings save battery defaults boot loader of course that's for updating the firmware on the wheelbase you can add profiles remove profiles so basic profile management up here there is a drop down for your profiles and you can see I'm gonna drop this down I've got a few profiles already three in iRacing in one in assetto corsa so it's nice to be able to easily navigate to whatever profile you need and click on it if I'm going to Lucas truck I click on that and it would change to what that was right I'm gonna leave it on the floor 88 GT 3 for now now down below that there's an center button which is nice you just love the wheel center it up and I load the wheel up but you sent her it up and then you would press the center button well currently I'm on 900 degrees Mac force is 60% of course we can take that all the way up to 100% if we want so yeah I was running at 6 I've been trying a lot of different settings on this that's why it's sitting at 60% right now and over here we have where we're actually going to be doing the tuning with some slider adjustments and we have three tabs up here for you back in code or debug is it for force feedback encoder is dialing in the encoder that we have on this which you will probably never change and that's the bit C re V and of course that has a resolution of over 4 million so very good debug is where we can actually start logging if we're having a problem you know with the wheel or the system some way then we can actually log it and send it to VRS and let them take a look at it see if they can fix it for us if there's an issue so back to the force feedback pretty simple stuff here again smoothing filters I currently have man on 2 it goes to 1 and then 0 and I think I'm actually never gone past 2 3 it'll go up to 4 okay so you know what before there and smoothing is just the the ramp you know in our recent let's take that example 60 Hertz signal it can it actually just kind of smooths out the the ramp of that signal the sine wave that's coming out so it doesn't cut off the peaks it just smooths up the ramp up it is the way we explained to me so yeah it works I can tell you that damping 10% I can go all the way up to 100% I don't think everybody would ever use that but 20% 10% depends on what you want now if I go to the default configuration I'll hit default and you can see it's a hundred percent in the smoothing is one and that's 10% that's comes out of the box from VRS and you can just tune from there which is you know very cool we also have friction inertia and spring effects and I've played with that a little bit but I got a pretty good feeling on the one that I have for my Ferrari 488 here at even just using six per 60 percent smoothing - dampening 10% so you know I don't have anything of friction inertia and spring and it's kind of an ongoing thing - I'm playing with things depends on the car and the track you're on - you might want to play with some of this now you're probably looking at device effect only what is that well there's a drop down here and it's device effect only game effect only and device and game defect so what this is is device effect only means that this motor and the software and the firmware is just going to be reading the telemetry stream off the game alright so we're not paying attention to the any canned effects that might be coming out of whatever game or simulator what do you want to call it that we're playing and you can change that if I was in a set of Corsa project cars - I might want to go in and do game effect only or I might even want to combine the two device and game effects right so it just just gives you choices for how the wheel will feel and what effects that you want or don't want coming to your wheel as far as the force-feedback years so it does give you some options there and of course it's all the same on all the rest of them - so this is going to be a short little clip because well that's about it there's not much else to do here so again I kind of like this you know it's very simple intuitive and yeah it just gets the job done quickly and being able to do it quickly gives us more time to spend actually driving and messing around with all the different things that we can do I can some of the other direct drive wheels out there but again it only matters it's only a good thing rather if the wheel can deliver it using these type of just these few different adjustments we have here and like I said we're going to get into a driving session and we'll see just how well it does that so we're gonna be doing a live tuning session just to see what the different effects or different adjustments as far as the effects go to our force feedback on this wheelbase and we're going to go through the default in other words out-of-the-box configuration it comes with this so we're gonna go with 100% max force smoothing is at one dampening is at 10% friction and inertia and spring are at zero and we're on device effect only on all of our settings of course the only one that we should be feeling because all the rest are off is the dampening and of course the smoothing is at 1 so I'll further adieu I'm going to go ahead and save those just make sure they are the effective ones and we'll get in here to iRacing and I'm going to make sure that I'm at 19 Newton meters now remember peak force new tomaters is 21 this wheel base but I usually put it 1 Newton meter less than that it's just a practice I cut into a while back it because it seemed to work for me and I just kind of stuck with it and our strength is gonna be 7.5 of course I can adjust that in the car and to tweak anything that I want as far as the force goes this is gonna be pretty strong right off the bat we'll go ahead and jump in the car a little doubt in my mind this is probably not where I'm gonna end up and I have my black box down here set for force feedback strength adjustment on my wheel here so I can just turn the dial and change it so let's see what this feels like right off the bat it's like the sun's starting to set here at sebring yes that's pretty heavy and I got the volume down on the car hopefully that's not overwhelming my voice here I'm pretty sure isn't yeah so I'm gonna go over some curbing here and I'm watching my my meter up there for the force feedback see if I'm clipping anywhere and there's a little clip right there now of course I I'm not gonna be driving like that at speed and what I'm trying to compete but it's good to see where I use that as a judgment on where my clipping is so if I'm only clipping on the curbing then I'm good to go everywhere else on the track man 100% is its manageable at 7.5 remember a force feedback is only 7.5 so that's why it's manageable but I wouldn't want to run it like this all the time yeah it's a bit much let's see what this does yeah ok so that's a bit strong even 7.5 now I've got 2 choices here I can go change my force feedback strength down here to 6.5 and that might do it but I'm also gonna watch my force feedback dial up here just to see how much the less force feedback I'm getting because I've turned that down now it's kind of a dance here yeah so there's left less force in the wheel now but I don't seem to be getting the spikes I was before even though it's curbing isn't as the massive it's the others worth that's pretty good there these these rumble strips yeah you can definitely see that at least I can see it I don't know how old you guys can see it but any good rumble strips though right they're very good rumble strips so definitely less force feedback from the game being output so what I'd rather do instead of that just go ahead and stop here we're gonna get out of the car because I'm gonna change it in iRacing as I change it up here in the draft in the end when I'm calling the driver which is the wheel tool and I'm gonna take this to 90% and this is just a strength adjustment I haven't tuned anything for dampening smoothing yet and I'm going to save those settings and then I'm gonna get back into options here and of course if I'm at ninety percent that's ten percent less of maximum so I'm gonna put this down to 18 Newton meters alright so done easy enough and I'm leaving a 7.5 because I don't wanna mess with that just yet that'd be like my final tweak all right well let me go back up seven five where it wasn't my direct force for you back here there we go it was a six five because I changed it alright so I got on the track looking for some curb to abuse ramming curbs is so much fun yeah already I can sell this is this is the better setting for me personally and again remember all this stuff couldn't be more subjective it's just a process that I go through with my wheels when I'm testing them there you go there's yeah see I got some yellow almost red there on that bump on that curbing so this is oops you also have to pay attention what you're doing on the road so I've got a feeling this is pretty close to where I'm gonna be as far as strength goes it feels good the wheel actually feels pretty good and I haven't changed anything yet feels just a little bit I don't know Nachi very reactive a little bit notchy there so what I'm gonna do is as I continue to try to get it dialed in I'm gonna go to smoothing I'm gonna put that at two instead of one so remember that's supposed to put a curve on the this the sine waves that we're getting no come on slide over here there goes and some wooden slab there for a second just wasn't doing it right alright so now we're it - so we're smoothing out that 60 Hertz curve on the ramp up so let's see how that affects anything if anything yeah already it's affecting yeah that's much better already yeah yes okay yeah and still get the detail there yeah I'm liking this looks like two might be my smoothing setting well I can keep it on the road here we go alright it's hard to do the tuning and talk and concentrate what's going on in front of me to not forget how fast I'm going alright so we're going over this curb yeah that's good that's good alright so the smoothing really changed it I can tell right away that works in a good way of course again somebody might not mind a little bit of the sharpness there but almost like a notch eNOS but the I'm going over these curbing slowly so I can feel what they if I still have everything there and I do very good yeah very good there so all this is good alright so we're at 2 or at 90% and I'm still at 7.5 in my force feedback strength in iRacing so I'm gonna go try something else here what I'm gonna do now is go to the Vice effect only I'm gonna go to game effect only and I'm doing it under dampening so I'm leaving the rest alone cuz I'm not using those all right we're down our long straight here this is smooth straight so there's really not much to tell me about what's changed or hasn't changed but right off the bat it feels like the strength has changed a little bit so according to what my understanding is now we're only on game obviously we're still getting telemetry but we're on game effect mode and it definitely is different just it's less force not much but a little bit I can tint I can tell it a little bit less force and it's the wheels not as active either yes it's less active so that's game affect only well I'll tell you what I'm not crazy about that let's go to game device and game effects see what that does oh here we go see what this does okay the strength is back and it's acting much more active it feels like let's say I mean I can't say that right now let me go uh there were some bumps here curving and stuff yeah that's good this is actually not too bad yeah it's um it's smooth but strong and there's a lot of detail and we'll do some more that as we get through this hairpin over the dirt here my usual path and we'll hit this transition from asphalt or concrete I felt good and smooth but it was there media immediately there that's actually it's not bad yeah this one force-feedback meter up there is good I haven't got clipped off that bump a little bit but that's okay it's not nothing wrong with that actually I like this huh hmm okay so there is an effect change there when we blend the two I'm gonna go back to just a device only save it and make sure because you know it's easy to forget why you're doing these tuning sessions where you were I mean even with just these few settings that you cut to mess with it's easy to forget you know where was that before where I really liked it now that I kept tweaking it and I mess it all up yeah that feels good yeah it's so much like the game effect no I don't know I don't think um always hard to tell that's how close it is it's just hard to tell so I'm gonna leave it on device I think I think that's where I'm at on the Ferrari here so 90% with 7.5 in the force feedback strength maybe I might tweak that later on in fact let me tweak it now I'm gonna take it up another to 85 see how that works is it just some speed up here for this bumpy curve we go around its speed get off in the dirt it actually feels pretty good to only put one up to eight five with the bumps this is pretty good I'm still looking up here for my clipping and I just got some red going off that bigger bump so this might be pretty much where I need to be yeah nothing there it was it was like I'm getting a full force feedback but I didn't get any yellow on that see our bump yeah a good bump crossed there my favorite bumps on the track for testing things look at that actually pick up some speed thank me going that faster yeah I got some yellow on that should get a little yellow here yep okay Wow actually I kind of like this I might it depends on the length of the race I'm in I might kind of go in between that 7/5 8/5 at this particular setting and I'm sure there's somebody I just got some actual red and yellow coming over that bump but again the object is to not be on the curbs right but I'm sure there's somebody out there that's gonna say this is completely wrong I don't know what I'm doing but hey it's all personal preference you know you like what you feel or you don't it's the way it is with this stuff but we can see that there's plenty of adjustment in here to get a good feeling in the wheel so well done to VRS the guys at VRS that's why I guess that took them so long to get this wheel out they worked on it and worked on it for over a year and a half I think it's and it's really paying off here for them this wheel feels really good okay I could use this wheel and have no problems if this was my only wheel it's that's yeah it passes mine my test for that and again I would go in and save this configuration you can see the other ones already have in here and and just you know again I might tweak it for a different track in a different car that's what all this is about and again nothing can be more subjective than this guys but I did want to do a quick driving session our tuning session while I'm in it live with you guys showing what I'm changing trying to describe what I'm feeling and I hope that you guys were able to get something out of this and you can definitely see what settings I'm using maybe you can try them if you have a VRS wheel and in tweak from there cuz you're probably not going to completely be satisfied with it might be too strong might be too weak who knows so anyway we'll go ahead and yeah but now we can get in have some fun and just drive we are at Sebring in the Ferrari 488 GTB and we are an eye racing of course and turn 17 the treacheries turned 17 and getting bounced around a lot here and we can feel every little bit of that in this wheel now first off the direct force Pro wheel is what I would call a good balanced system it goes first starts off with a known entity which is the mid 20 Newton meter or small midge as we like to call them motor now this is a tried and proven motor who knows the untold thousands or tens of thousands of hours people have put on this motor in this kind of configuration as far as being a direct drive wheel and you know I've never really heard of any midges going bad I'm sure there has to be a couple of them out there that went bad but overall it's just a workhorse and it's something that's going to be very dependable for a long long time so I think it was a wise decision by the guys at VRS to choose this motor and then to collaborate with midge themselves the factory to get the sensors and electronics they needed put in that to make it work the way they want to so yeah starting out with the motor just you know you can't complain with this midge motor and and there's still plenty of them out there by the way still running in in other systems so yeah it's not like they they went away just because some other systems came out with the latest and greatest stuff but of course a motor is just a piece of the puzzle here putting together successful direct drive force view back wheel experience and of course we have to have good cabling and we have great cabling here as you saw in the closer look or when we checked out the cables where they have all that shielding for EMI in them built by a third party vendor very well done there I'm I'm a big advocate of fighting EMI because more and more people are getting direct drive motors which is of course generating EMI in itself and people are starting to move to motion solutions which also you're surrounding yourself with motors electric motors and all this stuff puts out emi RFI interference so manufacturers need to start taking that into account and yeah i'm really happy to see that they've done that here now the controller backs i really like the little small diminutive size of this thing you can stick it anywhere you want to and hide it away somewhere there's no fan so it's very very quiet and yet not not much to complain about there of course the internals which really matters is the circuit design and of course the firmware and software to run it all and deliver the goods to our hands through the steering wheel and as a complete package here this pack you know the the direct force probe just gets it done it was easy to tune and by the way I really like the tuning software they have it's not overly complicated and it still gets the job done it was pretty easy for me to come up to speed on this system with a feeling that I thought I was getting the max I could out of it even though you know if I spent you know it was my only wheel that I use and I imagine over the time I would be tweaking a little bit here and there and of course they'll have firmware updates and things so things might change a little bit but out of the box this is doing a great job I was trying to find things to to complain about and the only thing I could say is it's just not quite as smooth in the force feedback delivery as my wheel that I used every day and I wouldn't expect it to be be quite honest and at the price point this is a very good package jeez I mean it it's good to be around simracing these days and watching all this technology trickling down as far as the price point is I mean I remember days went you know we had spent a lot of money to get something like this not that $800 is not a lot of money but yeah it's it's still a lot more affordable than it ever was before to get some very good direct drive feedback out of your system and that's what this does again only complaint I could have is I just wasn't able to get just as smooth as I'm used to from my other system that I use in the daily basis but other than that I you know I looked around hard to find something I didn't like and this is just a complete package it took them a year and a half or so to bring this product to market and you can see where that time was spent they were being perfectionist they were picking it apart and then turn it back down and then putting it back together and testing it and yeah they just did a great job here and I think you know how can you go wrong at $100 for a real tried-and-true servomotor direct drive force feedback wheel solution I don't know and you know it astounds me that they can do it for this price point and still in the mid you know it's got tons of power if that's what you want or you can turn it down if that's not if that's not what you want it's just just a very versatile system I think that a lot of people and it's good to see that it's going to be accessible to a lot more people than some of the more expensive stuff out there and you know what this this system is definitely punching above its weight when it gives you the force feedback you know you can feel everything you need to feel and then some it's just it just delivers everything you need to be able to control the car when you're at the limit all the time and that's what at the end of the day any DD system is supposed to do but yeah this one does it quite well and yeah it definitely gets the approval the srg approval rating for for this wheel system and yet even if the price point just makes it all that sweeter so yeah I really like this wheel system [Music] final thoughts on the direct force Pro force feedback wheel system from the guys at virtual racing school VRS has been developing this system for well over a year they were not in a rush to bring it to market and I think it shows in the final consumer product out of the box it has the look of a professional bit of kit and it doesn't stop there the circuitry in the controller box is well done with an obvious attention to detail and sporting a 400 watt Meanwell power supply which also indicates the care that was used in selecting which electronic components to use the custom SPECT Midge motor that VRS has for them sports some extra safety features not found in stock midge motors which is always welcome when it comes to using these powerful motors speaking of which I think VRS made a wise decision to go with the 20 Newton meter midge motors it is a tried and proven unit that has seen tens of thousands of hours in the hands of some racers over the last few years nice to have a well-known dependable motor in your direct drive wheel based system the direct force Pro also comes with some nice custom made controller cables using the stock aviation style midge connectors they are made by a third party vendor that uses a properly shielded cable and goes the extra step of installing ferrite chokes in both the power and a data cables EMI is a real concern and it's nice to see manufacturers taking steps to mitigate this potential problem another plus for this system is the easy-to-use wheel tool app that comes with the unit easy to use with a nice balance of tuning options that made it easy to find a setting that suited my driving style without spending a lot of time testing a long list of filters and other options when driving the system I was able to field road textures rumble strips very well and it was easy to tell what the car was doing in time to make correcting inputs and get my usual lap times there is no e stop switch available yet but I'm told that there will be one available soon there were two accessory items included with my review unit the VRS motor mount bracket and the combination shaft clamp wheel hub adapter this system is selling for $799 but if you get the hub and adapter and the motor mount it will cost an additional hundred dollars overall I like what the guys at virtual racing school have come up with here and could certainly recommend it if you are in the market for a direct drive force feedback wheel system 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 some racing garage calm

Channel: Sim Racing Garage

Views: 83,928

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

Id: CpEV2QQT2LY

Length: 50min 42sec (3042 seconds)

Published: Mon May 25 2020

Reddit Comments

[u/nirnav]

With the accessories and software you get with the sc2 sport, I'd say it's still the better deal.

[u/DealbreakrJones]

Ok so I just made a deal with my girlfriend-- she can name our new puppy Cosmo and I can get the Pro DD.