It's no secret that we have chosen direct drive for t […]
It's no secret that we have chosen direct drive for the upcoming product but the primary reason for our choice may surprise you and while stated above, may have escaped you!
"Low cost motor use dictates a pulley ratio that results in a loss of force feedback detail"
This is actually a quite troubling aspect of using a belt drive system. For the sake of argument, lets suppose a 20:1 pulley gear ratio for the belt drive system. While this ratio allows for the use of cheap motors, it's also the primary downfall. The belt drive motor would have to spin 20 times faster than the direct drive motor to match the direct drive systems ability to produce detail!
In a force feedback system, rapid motor direction changes are common. A direct drive system simply makes these changes and it's directly felt in the wheel.
The belt based system in our 20:1 example would need time to get up to the 20x faster speed it needs to match the direct drive system. However, in most cases, the motor will NOT get up to speed before the next force feedback instruction arrives. This means that it didn't accurately reproduce that data being provided to it by the vehicle simulation!
While many have commented on the smoothness of belt drive systems, I wonder how many realize that some portion of this smoothness is actually a loss of detail due to the hard-wired V-Belt and pulley gear ratio.
