The Chicane Podcast

Revolutionizing Racing: The SimHub Phenomenon

• TGS Sim Racing • Episode 12

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Ever wondered how to transform your sim racing setup into a cutting-edge experience? Discover the secrets behind integrating haptic motors and overcoming compatibility issues as Eric shares his latest adventures in sim racing. Alongside expert advice from Jeff and Jason, we discuss the importance of maintaining a good safety rating, even when indulging in a few drinks before hitting the track. Jason's hilarious recount of racing under the influence adds a light-hearted touch, while advocating for more relaxed gaming options like truck or bus simulators for those laid-back moments.

SimHub enthusiasts, this one's for you! We take a deep dive into the impressive capabilities of SimHub, a pivotal tool for sim racing aficionados. Learn about Nicola's ongoing dedication to enhancing this software over nearly a decade, making it the go-to hub for managing both hardware and software. From integrating with PlayStation and reading telemetry data wirelessly to supporting a myriad of devices, SimHub transforms your racing setup into an immersive adventure. Supporting this project through licensing ensures compatibility with a wide range of peripherals, bringing your virtual racing dreams to life.

Ready to level up your sim racing game? We explore the evolution of SimHub features and its advanced functionalities compared to factory-provided software. From no-code Arduino integration to control remapping, SimHub offers extensive customization to create a personalized racing experience. We dive into the efficiency of SimHub, minimal CPU usage, and extensive input options. Finally, we compare the Logitech G Pro and SimMagic for PS5, offering insights into the best investment for long-term satisfaction. Whether you're new to sim racing or looking to upgrade your rig, this episode is packed with valuable tips and engaging discussions that you won't want to miss!

Please e-mail the show for any questions, comments or stories/experiences at thechicanepodcast@gmail.com

Watch the show in video podcast form on YouTube at: https://www.youtube.com/@TGSsimracing

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Intro/Outro Rights below:
Song: Low Mileage - Hold You [NCS Release]
Music provided by NoCopyrightSounds
Free Download/Stream: http://ncs.io/holdyou
Watch: http://ncs.lnk.to/holdyouAT/youtube

Jason:

The hello and welcome to the chicane podcast, where we discuss all things in the sim racing world. I'm your host, jason rivera, and I'm joined here by jeff and Eric. How are you both doing today?

Jeff:

Doing good man. Hey, I'm doing well. I'm doing well. Hey, before we get into this dude, I think Eric should share it to everybody. We were talking a little bit before this got started, but he's got some news about what he was just doing in the rig before the show started.

Jason:

More news from Mr Kelly. Oh, my things are developing way too quick over there. What's going?

Jeff:

on. I got two things for the crew after before we get into this. But go ahead, eric.

Erick:

Hey, so first off I want to blame you guys exclusively for the rabbit hole that I've been going down, but last episode I talked about the disappointing fact that I couldn't use my haptic motors on the PS5.

Jason:

Dun dun, dun on the ps5.

Erick:

Since then I have been experimenting with the haptic motors because I attached a monitor to my rig, took my laptop over, installed a set of course and transport use sim hub to calibrate and set up the haptic motors is things are moving very quickly. All right, my wallet is smoking right now. I'm trying to be responsible, so wait I need to take care of that was, that was what we call the free test wait a minute, wait a minute.

Jason:

A laptop, so how's the games running on that?

Erick:

so if I set everything damn near to low, it runs it.

Jason:

It runs a consistent like 45inch frames, so you can Okay, so you kind of get a feel All right, I hear you yeah.

Erick:

I get a feel this is just the start, buddy.

Jeff:

This is just the start.

Erick:

I know I like the feeling.

Jason:

You opened the door, bro is what you did, yeah.

Erick:

I peeked in.

Jason:

I saw some things.

Erick:

I liked in there, man.

Jason:

I can see the damn rig in the background. Later on we might move over to video and you might see Eric's spaceship rig back there.

Erick:

Hey man, I'm trying to get like y'all.

Jeff:

Hey, I'm going to start sending you some links for that NZXT pre-builds and stuff like that.

Erick:

It's on the way At this point as long as it comes to coupons listen, they'll take care of you, promise, okay oh, I know they'll stand by the word and you know warranty. Everything got you bro yeah, man, they stand by my dollars too. Man, I know that when you send that link, jeff, make sure you send a coupon or something.

Jeff:

Yeah yeah, send a discount or something hey, uh, hey, jason, before, before we get going, I got a save round or alibi. Uh, correction to the previous show. Uh, we had discussed crew chief and we had said that the the main spotter's name was jeff. It is not correction for the show. We're not always perfect. We do the best we can and when we make a mistake we'll own it. Uh, his name is Jim. So, uh, if, if we messed up, fake, get, let us know on an email, the chicane podcastgmailcom. Let us know, we'll get it going, we'll correct it. Uh, that's one. And the other is let this be warned If you're going to have a couple of cocktails at night and then get in the rig, be prepared for that safety rating to go down a little bit, and I speak from uh experience this is uh not my most proud moment, but I wanted to be a comment to everybody.

Jeff:

To uh, you know, uh learn from a friend's mistake. Better to make it learn from somebody else's than yours. But uh, I had a couple too many of vodka tonics last night I was hoping to be eligible for a c license last night and uh, let's just put it this way I'm gonna have to race a couple more times in the d class before we be eligible for that c again.

Jason:

So I've been there, man, and that's that's a common occurrence, you know. Unfortunately, usually what I do is, uh, you know I like truck sims, so I usually that's my time to you know to get a little lid on the rig because you know I'm driving a big rig and it's it doesn't. I'm not traveling at 200 miles an hour with my head spinning already, and it's already spinning, you know, caused by an outside influence, right, which is you know the liquor so yeah, I wasn't crashing, just just like all.

Jeff:

It takes a couple tenths into a corner and you're blowing through that corner, so you might have misjudged a few breaking points here yeah, that's what we'll mark it up to. Just, you know, a little rusty, that's all. But anyways, onward and upward you know what.

Jason:

It doesn't matter. Did you have fun though?

Jeff:

I had a hell of a time, man, hell of a time that's it, there you go, didn't take anybody else out, just a couple.

Jason:

You know track limits, that's all I'm not gonna pretend this, that this hasn't happened to me, because it it has many, many times. So if you're not feeling too good, just you know and you care about your record, you could be feeling bad from being sick or you could be feeling a little, you know, busy.

Jeff:

The test drive never hurt anybody.

Erick:

You don't have the thrill of racing, but it's there, right, right, of course I like that suggestion too having like a casual kind of game you can play and just not have to worry about. You know, moving at 200 miles an hour.

Jason:

Yeah, or being so serious all the time. Sometimes I want to relax and I was just talking to eric before the show, our little show, debriefing, if you may and I picked up a game called fern bus and it's a it's a tour bus simulator and and I had this expensive, sophisticated rig and I'm driving around a tour bus. But I just think it's cool to be able to do that, if, if I'm in the mood to do so, you know. Or the taxi cab thing is kind of cool too, driving around barcelona yeah, I was gonna say that taxi game man, I need to.

Jeff:

I need to see if it works with my, my will I get a kick out of jason, I I'll like text you. I'm like, hey, what's up? And he's like, hey, I'm hauling a load from you know, tulsa to phoenix tonight. I'll be there in about three hours, yeah in the rig grinding.

Jason:

I was gassing up, I was gassing up and the clutch went out on me and I just stalled there and it was a hill and the fact that you just stop at red lights with the rig.

Jeff:

It just I don't know why.

Jason:

It's just funny man, it's awesome yeah, man, I remember jeff came over one time. He's like dude what, what, what are you playing? I was like dude. They just dropped the dlc for nebraska so now we're driving around and he's like what's in nebraska? And I'm like ain't shit in nebraska I'm gonna check out every road in that state.

Jeff:

Yes, sir.

Jason:

The cows and the trees and everything, man. So, yeah, I like to jam music and stuff and relax and not be so serious all the time. But today, today is the day and we have a special episode for you all. Strap yourselves in, because today we're talking about sim hub and sim hub is the master controller to everything that's on my rig. So, jeff, I would like to give this honor to jeff to open up with you. Know what is SimHub and basically how did it get to where it is? You know today, hey, thanks, jason.

Jeff:

So you know, in the previous episodes we've talked about, you know the rig with the 8020 and you know that being like the skeleton of your rig and if you think of that as your skeleton, the SimHub would be your equivalent of like the nervous system as it's wired into everything that's on your rig with hardware and software. So, basically, simhub is a versatile, windows-based software dedicated to improve the immersion in various supported simulators. So think of all your common games F1, ACC, setacorsa, wrse, all of the things they provide dashboards, led displays. They support the base shakers and the butt kickers that we talked about, the wind simulators. Simhub's been developed with hundreds and tiles of hours of a single developer, I think, jason. What's the dude's name? I forget his name. Uh, his name is nicola nicola. Yeah, absolutely super good dude.

Jason:

Um, I will get into getting a license, but nine years this dude's been grinding on it.

Jeff:

There's updates, like once a week with with bugs and fixes and new features, et cetera. Um, think of it. Yeah, like I said, like the nervous system of your sim racing experience wired into, I think it's fair to say, every device that is anything to do with sim racing, whether it's hardware or software. Um, you can manage it in a single place. You don't have to go hunting through you know gaj different software um to find the settings and stuff you can. Really, I would think that it's up for the 90 high 90 percentile of all the things it can manage.

Jason:

Um, right and would you would?

Jeff:

you agree to that?

Jason:

yes, totally. And you know sim hub, the developer, nicola, it's not just that he's developing software for himself or to make money. This individual is talking to others that are developing stuff plugins, because that's what SimHub uses the most is plugins and he's talking to them or they're talking to him and telling him hey, I want to develop this. Is there a way I can get this to work this way? And he'll add that to his code and just make it happen. You know what I mean. It's been happening with danny newman racing just released a new plugin. You know how. You would have to have a text file setting.

Jeff:

You know before to you had to edit this lines of code or whatever random lines of code and yeah absolutely he made a plugin now and all you do is install the plugin and it.

Jason:

It just works now. And now you have, instead of code, it's.

Jeff:

It's a gui, it's a graphical user interface, it's switches now, so it's just, yeah, if I could add one more, another huge data point for everybody. Um, so, sim hub spreads across all the different games that are out there, but it also I think it's like 80 games. Uh, it also goes across each game, each car. So, you know, I in a set of course, or a competition on it, I drive the McLaren 720 Evo and as soon as I fire up ACC, it knows that I'm going into the Evo and it dials in all the settings for the whole rig my light, the, the, from the lighting to the steering wheel, leds which map to which thing for, you know, as I'm going into that car, um, everything for that.

Jeff:

And then I quit that game and jump into, uh, I racing, and it knows that I'm going into the f4 car and loads all my f4 settings. So my steering wheel is totally different, my lights are different. You know the hue lightings that we've talked about at different episodes, read different places on the screen. It is incredible. It you can launch the game from sim hub, it will know what game you're, or, if you don't, it will know which game you're going into and switch. You know the settings for each individual game, individual cars. It's an incredible piece of equipment right, so yeah go ahead.

Erick:

to add to that, it, even being on PlayStation, it will read telemetry data from Gran Turismo 7. I can configure the port and when I start racing it will start getting telemetry, and so I can pull up a DDU I can customize that it'll actually show the real data from me driving. I don't even have to connect it to my playstation, it's just doing it over the network, which is oh, so it's doing it wirelessly really that's bad I didn't know that.

Erick:

I didn't know that like that's because I'm playing around with it uh, for what I could tell. It was pretty, pretty real time because I popped it up on my phone.

Jeff:

You know it has the option to you know run a ddu from your phone trust me yeah, yeah, yeah I mean that yeah it's crazy by itself is a reason to get sim hub. I don't we? If I think we got a portion about you know dd using the equipment, so we'll get into that we do, we do.

Jason:

The next portion is and we've said this many times on the show is to get a license, because getting a license helps support the project. It helps support hardware to be added to the list of compatibility his compatibility list, if you may, and also the games, right, you know his, his compatibility list, if you may, and also the games, right. So it also drives all Arduinos, and Arduinos is basically it's, it's it's a little complicated what those are. It's like custom built code for different hardware. It's like LEDs or some LEDs. Or let's say, for example, without going into the very nerdy stuff, let's say you bought a real life gauge for a car, like a turbo pressure. You can program this turbo pressure with an Arduino chip. This turbo pressure with an Arduino chip I forget which one it is, I think it's the AM 32 bit, whatever it is and the software that he built inside of SimHub automatically installs the language software onto that. So, for example, I bought a USB device that is a. It's a, it's a USB, it's like a pen drive, it's like a little small, little USB, and all that thing does is that it emulates a keyboard. It acts like a keyboard, like a virtual keyboard, and using that software on SimpHub, I was able to convert that into a control mapper, which we're going to get into control mapper later.

Jason:

But going back to the license right, that covers the Arduino portion which he's talking about, the one place to drive all your Arduinos, displays shakers, arduinos, displays shakers, winsims and you can do it up to 68 frames per second and that's not just total. You can have 10 screens and they will all be running at a 60 FPS. If you just use the free one, it's limited to 10. And you'll also get with a license. You also get the ability to start the app, minimize, no nag screens. And also he wanted to not price people out of this Right. So he's like we want to make this affordable, so you choose the price to SimHub. We always say 10 euro, because 10 euros is kind of like in the middle or it's basically what I paid for it, and ever since I got it I've donated, you know, many times for licenses or help people buy a license that needed it as well. So, yeah, go ahead. Jeff.

Jeff:

I just want to emphasize something here, like sim hub is arguably the most important, most in-depth, a mile wide, a mile deep software for sim racing. And they're asking seven to like twenty dollars a one-time fee. We're not talking annually, we're not talking a month. One time you, you, you use this, download it and use it and you start to realize, like I've been using this what now jason for like maybe almost a year, and I think I'm just scratching the surface of all the stuff this thing can do. Um, it's a one-time fee. Like the dude has spent literally thousands of hours developing this thing.

Jason:

Um, and it's a killer piece of software like I. Challenge anyone to go and read through the changelog since the day it came out to now. And you're looking at a book. You're not looking at pages. You're looking at a book worth of changes and back to the back, yeah go ahead.

Jeff:

I always tell jason why isn't it easy, like you know, to just do this? Oh my god, here we go and he's like man, if you only knew how hard this sim racing stuff was.

Jason:

What even two years ago, three years ago, yeah you would have to run 15 different programs, and here you are with just one yeah, spoiled um, but yeah, I'm telling him. Jeff, keep your damn sim hub updated.

Jeff:

Keep it up to date, yeah like once a week he's got a new update, new features, new bugs fixed or whatever.

Erick:

Yeah, eric you guys want to say there, buddy yeah, I was going to say so when we being extremely new to sim hub. How long has this software been around? Over 10 years wow, that's crazy, but you can just coming into it and seeing everything you can do. So when you see it now?

Jason:

it's like yeah, it's like, what in the world is all this? And it didn't start off like that, right, it's just been adding stuff every single week or every two weeks. Sometimes the guy goes on a rampage and he'll release three, four, five versions, right, jeff? Like at once, like back to back. Oh, fix for that. Beta, beta software, beta 2., beta 3., beta 4. Then stable version, and it's all free. They're your updates. And to add to the license that Jeff was talking, or it being a one-time payment, the license is perpetual, so you can move it. So if you have a second pc you can use that same license. You don't have to pay for it again. You know what I mean. You have your license.

Jeff:

you can use it as many times as you want yeah, that's amazing yeah, just like just support the community and the duty puts the work in. I mean, it's a coffee that you're basically buying, like something that you could honestly charge the coffees man a hundred bucks for the license and it'd still be worth it. I mean, I just think like, like I see all the people in starbucks and how many times people go to starbucks a day. Right like this is the equivalent of one Starbucks ride or whatever. It's not my thing, but yeah, it's like a tip.

Jason:

It's like a tip to him almost Well.

Jeff:

Yeah, so I think we talked a bit about DDU's, or direct display units, previous episodes. You know the small little screen in front of or top of your steering wheel in front of the screen. So this is like where you really integrate that into your game or whatever SIM you're using. You can we use love. I think you know me and Jason are big fans of lovely dashboard. It's probably arguably the most common, popular one out there, but everybody's got their. You know the one that they like, um. But this is where you decide which one you want like for. For me, I have um, a ddu. I have a vocal, smaller vocal uh monitor on the right side of my wheel and then I have a button box with another monitor I'm not flexing here, um and then a fourth monitor on top and everyone has a different uh dash studio most of actually all but one or some type of lovely dash it was a massive flex man.

Jason:

I don't want to hear it.

Jeff:

Uh, hey, man, you're right, I learned from the best, uh. But anyways, like you go through here and you download them and then import them into SimHub and then it pushes them to the dashes, and it's awesome, and I think Eric was talking about. Even if you have a phone or an old tablet that you're not using, you can send it wirelessly through SimHub and like a QR code that you take a picture of and boom like magic and it's on your phone. You can place your phone on some little Etsy mount that you get picture of and boom like magic and it's on your phone. You can place your phone, you know, on some little etsy mount that you get and there you go, you got like a badass ddu, you know, for seven bucks license fee through simhub. I mean, it's incredible.

Jason:

the device you had laying around.

Jeff:

You know a tablet you want to put on the. You know the side, the right side, build like kind of like a, a console for like a gd3 car or whatever, like there's so much stuff in just the dash studio and to that end, like you can have it.

Jeff:

You can have it figured out, for hey, I am the car. The game will recognize that you're in the 720 evo the mclaren and it'll send the each screen to the one that you have pre set up for the mclaren every time you just jump in it. Boom, there it goes, it's all set up same time everything.

Jason:

And to add to that, there's also the playlist function. So I run ac, the original ac, with content manager, which is, you know, that's a whole nother episode right there, content manager, oh my God. So you can have a playlist. So I have over a thousand cars I'm not even kidding Over a thousand cars and they're all mods. It's like 500 gigs worth of data that I have and I can have a playlist and say, hey, for these set of cars, I want you to load this dashboard on this particular device and it knows to do that, and it saves me thousands of time, you know, thousands of hours, because I don't have to worry about oh, I'm in this car, I need to go to SimHub, change this, blah, blah, blah, blah, everything Now.

Jason:

Now, it takes a while to set it up. Right, you have to set it up. You set it up once and make sure you're backing this stuff up. But yeah, that's in a nutshell. Dash displays are what I use it for the most. It's how I started using SimHub with the dash studio, and then we also threw in, in the last episode, race departmentcom. That's where I get most of my dash, my dashes, and they're all free, if they're all free.

Jason:

If you want a dashboard to look like a replica of an f1 car, they have it. If you want it to be the replica of the actual gt3 car that you're racing, they have it, and it's one-to-one, just a little, you know, more realistic with the data that's being transmitted there. So, yeah, so it's. It's still growing. So sim hub is still supporting many more devices. You know they just started supporting sim magic stuff because sim magic if you guys don't know, a lot of their stuff is proprietary, so it only works with their software, except for the GT Neo. The GT Neo is the first wheel to ever come out that supports SimHub while using their added MagLink. That's what you need, because the wheels need to be connected via USB. If it's connected wirelessly to your base, simhub is not going to see it. It's not going to be able to transmit data to it.

Jeff:

So that's just so you know, adding on to how often he updates it. So SimHub kind of follows the obviously the sim racing world and community. And when Hue Lights started becoming real popular SimHub I think we'll get into some more detail but they saw the trend that hey, like this is a need from the community, that hey, we're having to go into like this really crummy software to manage our you know, our hue lights and now you can manage it a thousand times better in sim, uh, in sim hub, uh, those lights. And so they're just following the trend and they constantly update their stuff on what the the sim racing world is starting to incorporate it into their rig and the racing and things like that. And then they, they included in the next update to uh SimHub.

Jason:

Right, right, and we'll touch a little about a little bit more about light control later. The next one up is base shakers and vibration motors. So we've covered this in the last two, uh, last three, last two episodes about bass shakers and about vibration motors, right, so, and also you know haptics same thing. So it's nice to have the calibrations set to each car and that's how you do it. If you were using original software, simmagic software you can do that, but that's another piece of software that you have to have open.

Jason:

I don't want that. I want one piece of software open that's handling all the data for me and that's all I need, other than the crew chief in the background and the CC start that I talked about. So base shakers is different. You're not going to have the same profile for every single game. If you try to do that and you jump in a rally car, you're not going to feel your your body, you know, because it's a lot of bumps and a lot of stuff going on and you need to fine tune things based off the platform that you're on just, you know, put the cherry on top of that one is it's way like sim.

Jeff:

Uh, sim hub is way even better than the, the butt kicker software itself that comes from the factory. There's what is there like legitimately 25 different, you know, characteristics that you can integrate into the or effects you can put into the butt kicker in sim magic or, excuse me, in sim hub, and then the butt kicker software.

Jason:

There's maybe, maybe 10 right, this is you know. This is a good point.

Jeff:

This is a good point yeah, it's just so much more depth. You can change the frequency of the butt kicker on. You know the, the, the strength. You know the, for different effects too, for each individual effect, right, yeah, and you can prioritize which one has the priority over. You know, hey, if, if my revving is high and it's already vibrating, do we does it prioritize the shift over the vibrate?

Jason:

it's just way better that's a good way, more depth. I'm glad you brought that up because you know, with the new haptic motor that you just bought, eric, if you just go into sim magic, sim pro software, which is the sim magic, they do three things. They do um, the clutch bite they. They do ABS, tcs. You go into SimHub and it's simulating wheel slip and throttle and different effects. You know, and you can tune the strength of each. You can also tell it to prioritize an effect. Prioritize an effect, like, if you want, for an example, on a butt kicker, if you want your gear shift to not be lost, right the vibration, I tell it, hey, prioritize gear shifting. So the rig is vibrating from the driving, but then as soon as I shift, it'll cut all vibration and use all its power to deliver that one shift vibration and then continue on with the rest of the telemetry. That's being transmitted and there's no lag. It happens real time.

Jason:

There's a lot of buttons and switches in SimHub. We're just trying to give you a detailed overview, if you may, because there's a lot of functions that we don't use, that are part of SimHub that you can use. Or there's third-party plugins that you can install, like American Truck Simulator plugin. That's not a plugin that you're going to get off the. You know you can install SimHub but you're not going to have that plugin. You have to go in and add those things to it. But the stuff that we're talking about today is things that are kind of built into SimHub the moment you install it. So no code Arduino support.

Jason:

So again, I covered this previously just a few minutes ago, and it's basically any led matrix. So you have these led matrix that have like 32 lights, 24 lights. You can program pictures of leds, so when you shift the leds will draw out a number, kind of like a gear, and you know you, you need to have software that can understand that and also talk to the game and transmit that Segment displays gauges different gauges that are built for cars are being used in SimHub A gauge with a needle. There's no pressure being transmitted into this gauge, because that's how gauges work. It's with pressure or heat or whatever sensor. He's simulating all of that using telemetry, which is absolutely. It's incredible.

Erick:

It's incredible so that's crazy. So I see the guys that go to like a junkyard and they'll snatch a dash out of a car and they'll use that to build their sim rig and they'll have the actual, you know um speedometer and all that stuff actually working. So more likely they'll use a sim hub to simulate all that, that data. That's crazy.

Jason:

And this guy has one in the car and it's a needle. It's a needle that's yes that was out of a car and is working now on your computer Like dude. It's got like a 1989 BMW 318.

Jeff:

Bro, Fashion is living up to something. Yeah, it looks cool as hell. Don't get me wrong, it's awesome. Yeah, I couldn't get away with putting that in my living room.

Erick:

I was about to say that's definitely not wifey approved.

Jeff:

Hashtag bachelor lifestyle.

Jason:

Hey, to each their own man, I think it's cool as shit, but yeah, go ahead, yeah, so there's a guy, I think he's all over the social media and he has a full Peterbilt dashboard and it has like 17 gauges on the thing and that's all being handled by a one piece of software one that is insane yeah insane, and it's he he's been optimizing it. I mean I maybe see a five to eight, ten percent%, 10% CPU usage at the highest. You know what I mean.

Jeff:

I'll happily trade that, then spend in 20 minutes reconfiguring all my things to whatever car I'm about to jump into. Happily take that.

Jason:

Oh, and that's a good segue for the next one, which is the control remapper. And this is the next thing that I am pushing Jeff so hard to get into. Because imagine this You're about to buy you guys have multiple wheels, now both of you. So now if you unplug a wheel while you're playing ACC the game, sometimes you need to restart the whole game, because now you unplug the wheel and it doesn't know that you unplugged it, or it's looking for it and it can't find it. This is the fix.

Jason:

And here's the kicker you can have 128 buttons, unique buttons that you create by yourself. You literally create a button, you name it and that becomes a virtual button, kind of like VJoy. And why is that useful? Well, for example, I have a wheel that has buttons that are just a button. Press right, it's just on, off, on off.

Jason:

If I want this button to be two functions in one, for example, I have my radio button on my CSX3 and we play iRacing. If I want to open the chat on iRacing, I press the radio button one time and that opens the chat and it stays open until I press the button again. But if I press and hold that same button, it'll skip the function of the iRacing chat and now I'm talking to crew chief single button press. So then your yeah, your inputs you can change, you can make buttons into a toggle. So you know, me and jeff have this um switch, right, that's connected to our dashboard, it's in the apex buttons and it's a little, it's a toggle, it's a metal toggle switch but when the game sees that it treats it like a button press. But now with the control remapper from SimHub you can make it so that when that button is flipped up, it's kind of like if it's pressed and it stays pressed and engaged. So it's kind of like. You know, it's that much more control.

Jason:

You program it one time and then you use another app called Hide, hid, hide, right. So HID, hide will hide all your human interface devices, hid. And what does that do? If you play a game like F1 on PC and you have all these different inputs, it wants you to program each one. So what I did was I hide the entire, my entire, you know, hid list. All my devices are hidden, except for the mapper and, of course, the wheel. I need the wheel to show up and now I can just assign buttons using an application on my phone from SimHub and when it tells me, hey, what is gear up? I press a button for gear up and that very same button that's assigned to gear up is the same gear up for my GT Neo and my CSX-3. Gear up for my gt neo and my csx3. I don't have to map individual controls or individual wheels to each profile, to each game. It's insane and it's free you know what I mean?

Jason:

that's some simulation right there, and that is dude I'm I am, so I control my lights in the house with my steering wheel. I'm not even kidding.

Jeff:

I'm going to tell you how many times I've gotten the rig get the game go on.

Jeff:

Cause, you know it's way better driving with lights on. Yeah, I see, realistic, it wasn't until yesterday I was. You know, I spent the last like I spent the last weekend in the rig trying to figure out, integrate uh crew chief into my steering wheel so I didn't have to like just rely on him. You know, I could press a button now, um, for a lot of different things. You know, hey, what's my delta to front, what's the delta to back? You know all of the things, the information that you would want, but you run out of buttons really quick. So, jason, that's a. I might have to jump in and try figuring this out too, because it says essentially it sounds like you double the buttons on your wheel, or really any, all the buttons on your rig that you have. Doubles the button capability, if you will.

Jason:

Yes, because and here's the kicker button capability. If you will. Yes, because and here's the kicker so the mapper will work with your controller so you can use the original controls still, it doesn't replace them. So if your controller, if your wheel has 40 buttons, now you have 128 buttons plus the 40 on the wheel and you can set a toggle. Right, if I set a toggle switch, it'll switch to another different page and that's 128 buttons again on the second page. So that's 250 control.

Jason:

You're never gonna run out of inputs impossible I mean you won't even remember that many inputs, and if you do, you know, hats off to you because holy yeah, that's crazy man.

Jason:

But you're not. You know what I'm saying. You got to think like why do I need this many inputs? Well, it's the convenience. You have a wheel, you're in the seat, you're racing and you want to control things that are happening around your house or happening around you or happening around software that's running in the background. You want to turn the volume down on your game. You want to lower the force feedback while you're mid-corner. If you're racing for a two-hour race, you could set a knob to turn down the force feedback to give yourself a break. It's just, the options are limitless with this thing.

Erick:

I need that? Huh, I need. I said, I need that knob.

Jason:

So a knob. The knob is awesome because the knob not only that, if you have a DDU, there's a heads up display and it tells you what the PC volume is. It just works. I'm telling you, it just works.

Jeff:

Yes, I didn't really start to run out of buttons until this weekend. At first I was like I got, I got more buttons. I know what to do with boy. They get used up real quick when you start assigning it's really nice, I'm telling you things, yeah, that's yeah like my shift up right.

Jason:

I have and here's my flex I have a sequential. I have a truck shifter which is an 18 speed eaton Fuller. I have, with the up and down everything, and then I have another left-handed shifter. All three of those shifts are using Control Mapper. So if I press one button on one, it doesn't matter which one I use, it'll register the same input and the game sees it because it's assigned to that YouTube channel. Check his channel out on SimHub Remapper Button Remapper Also. Dan Suzuki has a coverage on it. Check those videos out. It goes into detail on what to do, how to use it and how to install it. And yeah, a USB that you could program that costs like $5. That's what it costs, I'm not even kidding. And you plug it in, you forget about it. It's in, it's. It's plugged in somewhere in the rig.

Jason:

It's amazing oh so yeah, so light controls we kind of went over. You know the light controls are, if you have two lights, then you get these two boxes right and you can move these boxes wherever you want to pinpoint where the light is going to hit the car, and then you can have that set to each car, because not every car is different. My trucks are not the same as a Formula One car. They're trucks, so their dashboards are huge. It's massive, huge, it's massive. So, in order to get an accurate reading per vehicle, it's nice to be able to have the option to use SimHub to tell it hey, this is the game I'm running and these are the trucks within the game. When I get into 389, which is my favorite truck, well, my lights need to be a little different because it's a 389. It's not a Kenworth, and so on and so forth.

Jason:

So that's SimHub in a nutshell. It'll control your lights, it'll control your PC, it'll show you your hardware and monitor temperatures, gpu temperatures, frames per second, all of it. It's a game launcher you can launch your games from it. And it's also a session lap logger so you can go back and see damn, what was the lap I did on ACC the other day on the Nürburgring. You can go into SimHub. You don't have to launch the game and also it monitors controls and events. So any button press that's going on on your PC it'll show up in the events page. And that's really my two cents. That's all I got for SimHub.

Jeff:

Does anybody have anything else on it? Yeah, if I can just add, I think Jason kind of went into like your master's level, phd level, some stuff there that you can do with um no, no dude, don't get me wrong.

Jeff:

I'm gonna get in there and do the control map, but I don't want people to get over, you know, intimidated, if you will, by the stuff they, they can do. I am a very elementary level user. I use a lot of these things, but just an inch deep and I'm learning more and more. But it really is, even if, just like you said, an inch deep on all of the things or a handful of the things, is super useful. Super helpful makes things a lot easier to just jump in the rig and drive whatever you want to drive without having to remap a whole bunch of stuff.

Jeff:

You know, get intimidated by you know all of the super Gucci. You know niche, niche things that you can do with it. It does a lot of good just for the simple, you know user that just wants to jump in the rig and drive.

Jason:

Right, and it's nice to to nice to have the option. You don't have to. But I'm just going to give you the scenario, a quick scenario. Like I said, jeff and I we use this switch that it looks like a toggle switch, right, you know what I'm talking about. And we use that for our ignition and then we have a starter switch, but then when the session changes, the game doesn't know that that switch is pulled up, so we have to pause the game, pull the switch down and then pull it back up to turn the ignition on right.

Jeff:

Huge pain in the ass, right, like if you're in iris. You need to go all the way back to the pits, restart, turn your thing off and then jump back in the car. Yeah, go ahead, because the game, the level of pain in the ass, it is no, no, you're this is.

Jason:

This is good because the game will only allow you to assign one button as ignition and one button as an engine start. But that's not the case with with the mapper, with this, with the remapper on the. But on my controller I have an engine sign and if I press it, that initiates the ignition. If I press and hold it, that's a start engine. So if I spun out and I want a quick start boom, I can just hold down the button quick start, hold the clutch in, go. Or if you're playing iRacing and the game has to load into another session to start up the qualifying, I don't have to reset my button. I could just leave it on, press the button again and program it the way I have it set up. So that's just an idea for those of you that are using SimHub and have some sort of similar situation. And I agree with Jeff's point of not getting so deep into this. If this is your first time, take things very slow, do things one at a time and it'll all start to make sense.

Jason:

You know the things that we're talking about in this episode and you can always go back and replay the episode or you can send us the question. You can send us a question on the Chicane Podcast at Gmail. That's how we'll cover it and we will gladly. Any of us will address that for you. Okay, and, and, and, and. We will cover every single question comment story that's being sent to us. So don't feel like we're getting thousands of questions and we're never going to get to yours, because we will. If we have to, we'll cover. Well, if we get overwhelmed with questions, we'll just drop an episode on questions and concerns or situations or stories. We want to hear it all. And with that we actually have the question of the week. That's going to be executed by Mr Kelly, so I'm going to give the mic over to Mr Kelly.

Erick:

All right. Thank you, jason, so super excited to answer your questions. Like Jason was saying, we will address every single email we get. This week's email is coming from drewfunk11 at gmailcom. Thank you for reaching out to us, man. His question is about SimMagic. He says I was wondering what Eric thinks about using SimMagic on PS5, compared to something like the Logitech G Pro that's available to play natively on console. Thanks and said from iPhone. I'll give you a pass on the iPhone piece. But as far as comparing it to the Latticek G Pro, that's a very good question.

Erick:

If you're not familiar, the Latticek G Pro is basically a steering wheel motor pedal combo kit. That's the big brother of essentially the G29, g920 series of steering wheels for consoles. It's direct drive. It has some pros, one of them obviously being that it's natively compatible with the PlayStation. They also have their own proprietary force feedback enhancement feature. I forget the name of it, but if you are just dead set on being on console, it's a step up from the basic G29. Up from the base, the basic G29.

Erick:

The problem is you have to use the steering wheel that comes with it. It has to be a lot of check wheel. There's no flexibility. There's no swapping out other wheels Right now. That system has been out for a year and there's only one steering wheel for it. It's a D shaped or D style wheel. You're stuck for one, for two it's. It comes with the pedals, but the reality is it's kind of expensive for what you're getting. It's 11 newton meters with sim magic. The flexibility I could if I wanted to strap a shoe to my sim magic alpha and drive with a shoe. It doesn't care.

Erick:

The well, let's see it right just once you look at the price and just the limitless future you have with sim magic, the 69 sigma cortex converter that allows you to play gt7, I play a set of corsa and you're getting direct drive wrc too.

Jason:

You're playing wrc's wrc.

Erick:

I got the, I got my neo. I haven't even fired up uh f1 yet. I mean it's just once you're in that world and it's so open. I have two wheels now.

Jason:

My suggestion go the sim magic route don't get a logitech please go the sim magic route because let me tell you and I want to add to eric's comment and thank you so much, eric, that was. That was a great answer, very detailed, I appreciate. I appreciate that, yeah, the resellability of a Logitech compared to a SimMagic, on top of the price, the quality and the stuff you're getting. That alone, should you know, even if it's the Sim, it doesn't have to be the Alpha. You can get an Alpha Mini and it's still Alpha Minis, putting out same fidelity, just in a smaller package.

Jason:

If you want to, if you're looking to start out or if you're looking to upgrade, I would still suggest and I'm on eric's side get the alpha, call it a day, cry once and you can ask jeff about crying once. I've done them all the time. Cry once, don't cry 15 times, and what I mean by cry once is just take the take, take the hit with the money, save your money, get the stuff and if you want to step it up to the pc or if you're happily fine on the console, you will not regret your decision, promise yeah, and another thing that I just thought about once you start mounting it to an 80-20 rig the Logitech, you can only mount it one way, that's bottom mount, because of the way it's shaped.

Erick:

It's shaped like a dome, basically, with my Alpha, I literally went from top mounting it to now I have it bottom mounted and you also have the option to uh and jason. You can help me out side mounted yeah front side mount. You can front mount. I mean, you have so much flexibility to get it yeah, exactly over the space you want. Yeah, yeah, I mean it's, yeah, just it's the.

Jason:

The sim magic is designed for flexibility yeah, it's flexible and it's thinking about your. I mean, I know it's a business, but they're not trying to make you spend more than what you need to. They'll get you the stuff that you need and it could be moved around. Like Eric said, it could be applied in many different settings and it's a magic product. It will hold its value. A lot of people are in the want, need and looking to buy all the time, so if you want to upgrade to something even bigger, then it's not that much of an issue. I'm always thinking about the financials behind it, because money it can stack up fast. You know what I mean. It can. It can add up all real too quick and then it's like damn. A few months later you're like damn. I wish I would have done this. Now I'm stuck with this. I can't get rid of it.

Jeff:

You know that's kind of the scenario I'm trying to potentially save you from let me pile on too, because I think a lot of it is to the experience that you're going to have with each of those systems is going to be probably pretty, pretty stark differences.

Jeff:

You jump in and I'm not going to speak about the logitech because I don't. I don't, don't have one, never had one. But from a fanatec user to a simagic user, I I look at the rig and I'm like damn, I want to get in there. It just pulls you in the experience that you have with you know the wheel, the lights, the experience, the. You know the feedback, the granularity of the feedback. It just is a solid, good product that it just makes you want to use it. And I'm not going to speak that the Logitech wouldn't, but I probably would go out on a limb that your experience with the Simagic is going to be a stark difference and a much more enjoyable experience to get you to use the thing that you just spent a lot of your hard-earned money on. You're going to use it more. You're going to use it more.

Jason:

Yeah, go ahead, go ahead, Eric.

Erick:

And I was going to say, to be accurate, the Logitech G. It is a direct drive unit. It's 11 Newton meters. It does force feedback. The pedal set is a load cell pedal set. It's a higher level kit than what you'd buy off the shelf at Best Buy, that's sure kit than what you'd buy off the shelf at Best Buy, that's sure. But the support, the flexibility, the future-proofing, the resellability, once again, the support. I'm in no less than four or five different SimMagic Facebook groups. I'm in two SimMagic discords. You, you know it, if you're worried about the future, get the sim magic get the sim magic and for all.

Jason:

We are not sim magic affiliates. Okay, we would love to be. If they are listening, I would love to test out your products. You know, I'll send you my address right now, but make the fx pro sim hub compatible yes, that'd be my feedback.

Jeff:

Make that they'd be the best selling wheel on the market.

Jason:

Just make it sim hub compatible I know, I know I'm for the price too. You look at the price, uh, it's kind of nice, um, but yeah, we're not affiliates. You know we don't get any money for you buying anything. There's no code. I wish I had a code to give you first of all, but we're being 100% honest on the show here and we're just trying to encourage new racers, or you don't have to be a new racer, but someone that's trying to step up the equipment to a higher level. So with that, a short roundtable fellas, I think we're good to go. Eric, jeff, do you have?

Jeff:

anything else to put out on the show Not in here. Man Nah, man Drive fast, Break late.

Jason:

There it is. I was waiting for that.

Jeff:

Can't leave without it, man.

Jason:

Okay, eric, we need to do something about this. Yeah, we need to find something for you. And it better not be PS5 is the master race. It better not be All right, because I will mute that part out of the show.

Erick:

You're right, that's unreasonable. Bye, andrew.

Jason:

You're right, that's a reasonable buy-in draw. Oh, no, no, that's two strikes, two strikes. No, he did it. Eric, we're going to have a discussion after the show. You guys, thank you so much and have a great start of your week. Thank you.

People on this episode

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Jason Rivera

Host
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Erick Kelly

Co-host
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Jeff Smart

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