[daringrain32781]

I dove into a new area recently: hardware. I have a bit of a sim racing hobby, but I only have a Bluetooth game controller. I found a project to make your own force feedback wheel base, called FFbeast. But before that, I've taken up designing and building my own shifter and (3) pedals.

I printed the main pedal frame and base with PETG, and I found some M5 hardware on amazon for pretty cheap. The pedals use a hall effect sensor to measure the proximity of the pedal to the frame base. They're wired to an esp32 ADC ports and I wrote a simple USB HID device with tinyusb and esp-idf which mounts as a generic game controller - good enough for my case. I saw some designs for a load cell brake pedal, but I wanted to do it as cheaply as possible first, so I found a stiff spring. Big inspiration was cncdan's design.

They feel great - I borrowed some old logitech pedals to compare the feel and these are much better! I think all in I spent ~$40 USD for the raw materials (spring, hardware, filament, hall sensors + wire, esp32) and a weekend of time.