Forza 3 is a modern racing simulator title, exclusive to Microsoft's Xbox 360 gaming console. There's not currently much on the market at reasonable cost for controller hardware that makes use of the game's clutch feature and employs a HH-pattern stick-shift manual transmission.
You only have the function of, 'up gear' and 'down gear' in the game. However, I want a unit that can selet any gear in a HH fashion. There're six gears in gameplay and an additional gear for reverse, so seven gears in total/max. I'm thinking of using an Arduino board and building a HH setup. If I create a circuit and make the gearstick conductive to act as a switch then have a resistor for each gear on a parallel circuit, Arduino I think can pickup current value? I guess I could then map each staggered current value to trigger a cycle pattern?
There are a lot of mods for Xbox controllers, whole tutorials of how to add rapid fire buttons and swapping the analog sticks etc. So tinkering with the connections isn't unfeasable.
To integrate it with the arduino board I'll have to break into a controller, isolate the terminals and feed them into the analog inputs. That way I hoping Arduino would be able to control on/off function for the gear buttons?
I guess a better way would be for it to somehow know what the previous gear was then change gear appropriately if this is possible with scripting the logic?
Some other guy online managed to add a clutch to his controller hardware with some vigilante soldering. So hopefully integrating it with an Arduino isn't such a far-fetched idea.
The aim really for this entire thing is to have a controller setup that's as realistic as possible. Actual metal not cheap feeling plastic. It's all a bit of fun really too.
So the main challenge I guess is C++ programming for the arduino. If anyone could provide some insight and point me in the right direction for writing the script and selecting appropriate hardware components I'd be very grateful!
Cheers,