Hello,
Im new around here but ive played with Arduinos before. So i have some experience with coding and such.
I have the idea of building a PC steering wheel, with a real car steering wheel and pedals. Now my biggest worry is getting things working on the computer. I think my best way to go is with an Arduino but i dont know what one is best to use. I havent found much on coding or anyone else doing this so can someone help push me in the right direction?
Thank you in Advance! 
Dalton
You need a Leonardo. Uno can't act as a joystick.
I have the idea of building a PC steering wheel, with a real car steering wheel and pedals.
The arduino can take analog input from pots and output the result as digital info. How does the program on the pc operate and how does it input data?
thekidinbuff:
Hello,Im new around here but ive played with Arduinos before. So i have some experience with coding and such.
I have the idea of building a PC steering wheel, with a real car steering wheel and pedals. Now my biggest worry is getting things working on the computer. I think my best way to go is with an Arduino but i dont know what one is best to use. I havent found much on coding or anyone else doing this so can someone help push me in the right direction?
Besides looking cool, what do you want your steering wheel to do? What do you want the pedals to do?
Do the steering wheel/pedals have to mimic some other device (like a mouse) that is used by a program running on a pc? If so, do you have documentation on what the different commands being sent are? Or will you have to reverse engineer the protocol? If it is the later, be sure to know what the laws are in your country for whether this is legal or not. In terms of mimicing devices, if it is USB, it is probably simpler if you start with a Leonardo (or Due) that has support for mimicing USB devices.
Are you wanting to do a car simulator, where turning the wheel changes the display on a video screen? If so, it is generally beyond the capabilities of the Arduinos. Now, if you were wanting this to be part of a larger system, where you have a program running on the PC that does the video processing, and only uses the Arduino for returning the state of the wheel and pedals, that is in the scope of what the Arduino can handle. It still likely would be rather ambitious on the pc side of things, but you didn't ask about doing that.
Now, in terms of the actual wheel and pedal, I imagine if you might be able to find ready made steering wheels and pedals that are made for doing computer games. If not, it probably depends on what kind of budget you are talking about and what your skill level in crafting together physical things.
He could make Leonardo act as a Joystick like Esplora.
I want to be able to use the wheel and pedals to be able to race on the computer in iRacing. When i turn the wheel, or press a button, or press a pedal, i want it to do it in the game. I guess id be making a joystick then. Its the same idea. Maybe an Arduino isnt possible to do something like that. I know you can do just about anything with an Arduino though.
thekidinbuff:
I want to be able to use the wheel and pedals to be able to race on the computer in iRacing. When i turn the wheel, or press a button, or press a pedal, i want it to do it in the game. I guess id be making a joystick then. Its the same idea. Maybe an Arduino isnt possible to do something like that. I know you can do just about anything with an Arduino though.
An arduino can't turn an empty pizza box into a flat screen monitor. The easiest thing to do would be to skip the arduino and just hack/modify a cheap pc game pad that has dual thumb joysticks to interface with the steering wheel and pedals.
The arduino isnt capable of x and y axis's?
Im almost doing this. Not as cool as it seems like. Do some reading on MIDI input - old computers like to have such things as steering wheels connected via midi/gameport.
Thats like exactly what i had in mind 
It looks really complicated though. Is it alot easier to use a MIDI port? Keep me up to date. I wanna know if you get it to work.
Interesting thread - been threatening to do it for 40years, but somehow I never quite get there. What 'zoomkat' mentions above about using a cheap PC game controller, is good advice & good value for money -- all you have to do is desolder the joystick pots/switches, and attach wires instead, hooked-up to your custom hardware. It might be a tad 'old fashioned' to use 10k pots on all your controls (plus the things wear out), so you might think about augmenting the setup with an arduino gizmo...
...an example might be steering - a typical approach would be to attach the pot at the end of the steering shaft, and hardwiring that to the controller board ; an alternative might be using mouse optics to read the movement of the shaft, such being connected to arduino which in turn is connected to an i2c digital potentiometer which gets hardwired to the hacked controller (and one supposes you could replace all mechanical pots with optical or other systems like this, connected to an arduino which outputs via digital pots). I'm unsure of the benefits, but at least there's no pots to wear out, and in theory you could adjust/tailor the output from the arduino before/to suit the controller board. Btw, using a digital pot means an arduino -can- do a joystick if you want, but we're not talking sticks here...
...you could get goofy too, using bits&pieces from real cars from you local wreckers. An idea I had was using a real accelerator pedal/arm, still hooked up to a real throttle valve body by a shortened cable so that it felt a lot like the real thing -- the goofy bit, would be using the TPS (throttle position sensor) on the valve body to obtain throttle position (just like a car's ECU does =) And I've often thought about what it would be like to look at brake pedal pressure (rather than just pedal movement/travel) to get the analog brake data. You could make some kind of headset with a mems sensor in it, an get an arduino to blip head turns as 'look to apex' (mapped to dpad in the game, and hardwire the arduino outputs to there)..
..someone mentioned the olde 'gameport' (also doubled as a MIDI interface)..well, yes, but it's as deprecated as a floppydrive, no longer features on modern hardware, and doesn't offer as much I/O to play with. I also see an instrument set above from some car dash, and for sure an arduino could be used to drive those things -- the issue is, how many games are out there that actually output speedo/tacho data to userspace, so that you know -what- to display? (do such game titles even exist?) And even if they do, you'd have to decode/obtain that data somehow -- same goes for forcefeedback ; if you hack an xbox controller, it won't decode FF -- it will decode the signals for the 2 rumble motors, and you could interface those signals with an arduino to drive other motors/solenoids for those fx, but if you wanted FF you'd have to do something fairly obscene like hack a G25/27 or any other wheel-set that decodes FF instructions...or such'n'similar..
..I still don't know if I'll get to doing it before I die =)...