There is something alluring about combining a flight simulator’s flight stick with your car. I get it, one time I installed a flight stick as a Mercedes-Benz 240D’s shift knob. But can you actually plug a flight stick into your car?
Jason wrote about the most abused car in video gaming, Street Fighter II’s Lexus LS400. CSRoad asked a random question:
Torch, I think you’re the man to ask.
Can I interface my USB fight stick through the OBD2 port in my car?
Max Headbolts wins COTD for this seriously great answer:
No, the data lines on OBD2 are all CAN, LIN, or K-Line. While USB to CAN transceivers exist, they would need a whole lot of logic to translate the output of your flight stick to CAN commands. There is a Python CAN library you could run on a Raspberry Pi as the middleman to translate stick commands to CAN, but you’ll need the specific Arbitration IDs for the functions you want the stick to replicate.
Spopepro adds even more context:
I don’t know OBD2 protocols precisely, but it is completely accurate guide for nearly any computer protocol interface. The one thing I’d add is the Pi route, while maybe the most end user friendly, will have significant input lag. The joystick is already using an embedded controller that is taking analog and digital sensor positions and translating it to USB human interface device commands. USB HID is already notoriously input laggy (to be fair, a lot of this is on the operating system side) and adding what is more or less software emulation will make it worse. Far better to take an AVR, like a teensy, connect the sensors/buttons and program an embedded device to output the correct commands.
For CSRoad, the people you want to talk to are adaptive vehicle techs that modify vehicles for people who need different interfaces for cars. They know how to do what you want, and are awesome people who often are really creative as.their clients will all have some unique needs. But while they have the info, it’s unlikely to be legal for you.
Max Headbolts then goes deeper:
Depending on the vehicle, the Comma.ai interface may be an option as well, yes the Pi will add significant lag, please don’t try to drive your car this way. There is a video floating around on YouTube of someone driving their car with the motion sensors of their Smart Phone, in that case they hijacked the lane keep and adaptive cruise (this is all from memory) to control vehicle steering and throttle.
Anyway, if any of you hacker types want to give this a whirl, I’ll be your test pilot!
Finally, Thomas wrote about how his BMW broke again. You sort of have to have a sense of humor to own a German car because the alternative is crying. Vanillasludge:
I always admire the patience and sense of humor owners of old German and English cars have about their cars inevitable shit-taking.
They truly are the world’s greatest “glass half-full” people. A toast to you all!
Have a great evening, everyone!
Topshot: Mercedes Streeter
Friendly Neighborhood Nerd here. Older, pre-USB IBM PC joysticks, the ones that plug into a 15pin DSub connector on the sound card (you HAVE to have a peripheral card for this, almost inescapably — it was called a ‘game port’ most of the time, sometimes also a ‘MIDI port’, if you could connect a Casio/Yamaha/etc electronic music keyboard to it), those actually were analog,
As in, turn-a-knob-style resistive elements that vary how much current they let through (or don’t) in proportion to how far you shove the stick in one of two directions (axes). I don’t remember the pinout of the connector (which wire goes to what button, to explain it nontechnically) offhand, but it probably isn’t very hard to look that kind of thing up.
CAN Bus is a (very) slight variant on I2C/IIC aka Inter-Integrated Circuit (Arduino calls it a “two-wire serial interface” to avoid stepping on trademark-owners’ toes) so nearly any Arduino, such as an Arduino Uno or Arduino Nano (both of which are USB-programmable development boards using an ATMega328 microcontroller and a USB-to-serial bridge chip such as the ubiquitous, inexpensive CH341x-series or the both-famous-and-infamous FTDI FT232), for $15 or less, can very capably translate voltage/current levels output by a joystick like that, from a shared input source, to I2C commands
For a car (etc) that was not an EV, you’d probably want to mechanically drive the steering wheel itself in some way, unless you knew for certain that (a) the car was drive-by-wire and (b) those interfaces were accessible from the CAN bus through the OBDII Diagnostic Port (which is not information I’d think most manufacturers would be keen to give up for this kind of thing!) but, if you can put that kind of thing together, you probably already know how to sniff out what you need with your own car and electronics, and not to try and pull warranty service on your own tinkering (seriously, please don’t do that, it’s awful morals and ethics).
Obviously the onus is on you, if you do this, to make sure you still comply with the legal side of things, as far as the DOT/DMV are concerned. Most likely that’s a ‘custom vehicle’ inspection or something at least vaguely similar, but I don’t work for DOT or DMV, nor am I a licensed, practicing attorney, and you really should consult at least one person in each of those sorts of job categories who would know about this kind of thing before you go tinkering with a custom control system built in your garage or on your kitchen table for what amounts to a two-ton-plus metal and glass death machine of spite, rage, and electrons if you get it wrong.
The RTFM on this one is simple: don’t be an idiot, and do all the things the warning-label stickers tell you to do as far as consulting people who know what they’re doing and making sure you know what you’re doing, too… and, if you don’t, or if Bad Things Happen anyways, please in the name of all that’s good and right and Things People Care About in this world do your absolute level best to not hurt anyone else in the process… or, dare I say, worse.
“Can you drive stick?”
“Yeah, I can drive a manual.”
“No, I mean can you drive stick?”
OK, electrical isn’t my strong suit, but what if the car has electric power steering? Shouldn’t you be able to “simply” piggyback the joystick into whatever sensor/switch circuit the steering wheel already uses? Same for a hand throttle lever for throttle by wire? Use the hat switch on the joystick to access the various cameras? Map all the other buttons for whatever you want! I’m liking this!
I think you mean drive-by-wire steering; my understanding is that electric power steering would refer to a mechanically-linked steering wheel boosted by electric motors.
You’d definitely need to do more than wire it in, since a joystick can behave very differently from a wheel. For example, you can’t flick a steering wheel lock-to-lock in under a second…actually, would this be mapping x-axis tilt or z-axis twist to steering?
Growing up, the only gaming peripheral I ever had for our various home computers was a joystick. One of them was designed like a flight stick, and was really neat looking, but Windows only recognized 4 button inputs despite there being at least 8 buttons (that I can remember). I played a few driving games with it (p.o.d.!)…it was an experience, that’s for sure. I could manage decent lap times after many, many, many practice runs, but the tiniest little bump or twitch would send my little car spinning off into oblivion.
Look up the Saab 9000 Prometheus concept. The car uses drive-by-wire and is controlled via a joystick.
I believe Nissan/Infiniti also did some drive-by-wire experimentation with a joystick controller in the Skyline/G35.
Ooo, thanks for the knowledge drop!
It was in my strange mind not a random question, as I was looking at a FIGHT stick not flight stick. A Qanba joystick with a raft of Sanwa buttons, the kind of thing one might use to kick the hell out of an opponent or a car on screen. Or maybe drive a car in real life as a trained professional on a closed road. (-;
I’m afraid, like Mercedes, I missed that “flight” was actually missing an l and was actually “fight,” as in fight stick.
But you still got CotD! 🙂
Max Headbolts got the well deserved CofD.
I just forked the comments.
I’m sure someone already mentioned this (no coffee yet, so even a small scroll through comments is beyond me 😉 ) but I’m pretty sure I remember seeing something about Saab (I think it was) testing one of their production cars modified to be driven with a big joystick/controller. I don’t recall the details (other than that it was considered unsuitable for production) and maybe I imagined the whole thing, but there it is.
Yup, the Saab 9000 Prometheus concept!
Hey James Bond remote controlled his M5 from his phone back in like what, the late 90’s early 00’s? How hard can it be?
I have a hydrostatic zero-turn mower that is joystick controlled. It’s really nice for holding a cold beverage in the other hand or lifting some low-hanging tree branches to mow underneath. I would never want to drive a ground vehicle that goes faster than 9mph using a joystick.
Someone test this in a Maverick, please.
Titan submersible’s Stockton Rush used one…
Not a flight stick a Logitech F710 wireless gamepad. Somehow worse.
Supposedly the latest class of USN nuclear subs also use a gamepad. Part of the rationale is that the new breed of officers are already familiar with this interface.
Absolutely true. Talked to a few sailors before I left my previous job with the Navy. They do test them a bit more than OceanGate.
Sorry, it wasn’t meant as a serious comment really…
A legit flight stick on the Titan would have been a little cooler than a very cheap game pad.
Legit anything would have been helpful…
Saab beat everyone to it!
https://www.saabplanet.com/saab-9000-drive-by-wire-1992/
Why do I know about these things? Of my assorted hobbies I am a keyboard enthusiast. I have an IBM beamspring I’ve converted to USB using a custom capacitive sense controller. I made a switch-like retro game handheld from a raspberry pi, a chopped up super nes controller board, analog sticks, a teensy board, and 3d printed parts. I did the avr programming for my friends MAME cabinet he built.
In truth, one of the most liberating things you can do is learn to program C for embedded controllers. It makes the technical world your oyster.
Other note about the adaptive vehicle techs. My Dad is a T2-incomplete paraplegic and has had a variety of fantastic people help him with mobility. The vehicle techs are wizards. One even dailied a Jag xk-e, albeit SBC swapped. They really are awesome people, and awesome car people.
Awesome! I know of these things as I work in automotive product cybersecurity. The Python on a Pi thing is the cheap lazy way of doing things, yes C would be MUCH faster from an execution standpoint.
“keyboard enthusiast”
Interesting! Are you familiar w/ keyboard cat?
I loved keyboard cat…
(There’s a 10 hr video of just the cat playing ha ha)