PT-1 Pedal Set - Discussion

Very cool.

 

That sounds really great!

 

Value for money, super nice

 

Hey there! Thank you for the compliment!

 

Very good price for this high end product! Congratulations & good luck !

 

Thanks for the compliments!

 

That is a very good price, I was expecting it to be much higher based on the features and solid build quality.

 

We knew we wouldn't be able to sell these pedals if we were to charge a higher price. There are too many other options out there that are built very well. We had to offer a price that was competitive. We feel that we've found that price. Hopefully, we can keep that price down for as long as possible. We'd like to be able to offer this price for as long as they are available.

 

Seems like a great selling strategy though. To me these are already head and shoulders above any stock big brand pedal set on the market, by far, and not for an additional astronomical amount of money either.
This has the looks and feel of a high end pedal set but almost at a consumer price level. I agree that you usually get what you pay for, in this case, a bit more maybe. If this doesn't get people to move on from the toy pedal sets, I don't know what will.

Just a thought, as an added choice for people on a budget. Is it possible you supply all parts as a DYI kit to assemble at home? Probably saves in
some costs for you as well and allows even more people to have a go with these pedal sets. However, at this price, don't really know how much
you can realistically shave off though.. I imagine assembling a complete unit could already take three hours.

 

You've hit the nail on the head, wgeuze. The price for the pedals "not" assembled would be almost exactly the same. It would also create problems, and could result in a customer support nightmare.

We feel that by assembling them in our facility, we can maintain full control of the quality of the fully assembled pedals.

 

As I suspected, thanks for clarifying

 

You're very welcome

 

Hey guys,

We have decided to change our ordering strategy slightly. We previously announced that we will be taking pre-orders for our pedals, and that those pre-orders will be scheduled for mid to late October.

We felt that it was better to not take these pre-orders at all. We don't feel that it is fair to take money for something that doesn't exist yet. Instead, we are going to build all 20 sets of pedals, test them and then place them on our website for immediate order.

Also, our CNC machine has been ordered and should be arriving at the end of this month. That means that we'll be starting production in early September, instead of mid to late October as mentioned in our press release.

We hope that this will allow you to get your hand on our pedals as soon as possible! We will continue to keep you updated as more info becomes available.


Chris

 

Hey guys,

I wanted to go ahead and give you some news regarding the release of our new pedal set. As you may or may not know, we had intended to open up pre-orders for our pedals at some point in October. This was always just a "loose" estimate, and it was never final. That said, it was our goal to get them out as quickly as possible.

As I mentioned in an earlier post, we had a small setback. This setback was actually a combination of a couple of things. The most important of which is the clutch mechanism. We have come up with a completely new design that will be easier to adjust and be more reliable in the long run. We have also identified a couple of things during testing that needed to be changed.

We are going to take a few extra weeks to make these changes, test them and see how they perform. If they perform well, we'll make these changes to the final product. If not, we'll continue using our current design. We realize that a delay is not what a lot of you wanted to hear, but I can assure you that it's for the good of the product. This is our first sim racing product, and it's a big one. We want to make sure that it's done right. Making sure that our customers are happy is our number one priority.

Release Date

I've somewhat covered this above, but I would like to get into this a bit more. Our original goal was to have them up for "pre-order" at some point in October, with a lead-time of about 8-10 weeks. With our decision not to take pre-orders, the actual release date will probably be very close to our original plan. If you are wondering why we decided not to take pre-orders, be sure to visit our website at http://www.protosimtech.com and click on the "pre-order" button at the top. You will find a detailed explanation as to why we chose to go a different route. Unfortunately, I cannot give you an actual date as of yet. Our current goal is to have these pedals in the hands of our customers by Christmas.

Electronics

We have decided to use the DSD 12-bit controller for our pedals. We wanted to choose a circuit board that had the most features available, and this one fit our needs nicely. As an added bonus to an already "very adjustable" set of pedals, this DSD 12-bit controller board comes with a manual gain knob to adjust the sensitivity of the load cell. This is a handy feature for those of you that like to "tweak" how hard they like to press before they hit 4096 steps of resolution.

Coming Up

We have quite a few things planned for the next few weeks/months. A lot of you have been asking technical questions such as "What are the dimensions of these pedals?" and "How can I adjust this or that?" or "What will it cost to ship to ****?". I want to take this opportunity to address some of these questions. Our current website leaves a lot to be desired. Therefore, we've hired a professional to create an amazing new website that will give you an overall better experience. This new site will include all of the current info about our pedals, and a lot of new information including the latest news, technical specs, a new blog, and much more. We are hoping to have this new site go live very soon. Keep an eye out for that!

We are also working on a series of videos that will highlight all of the adjustments you can make to our pedals, and how to make them. These videos will be as detailed as possible, and will cover each and every adjustment separately. A few of you were wondering if we were going to offer a stronger load cell. I tried to explain to them that with our pedal design, this was not needed. But, without actually showing them why, it's difficult to understand. These upcoming videos will show how you can adjust the load cell to get the feeling you desire.

I've received quite a few emails asking about shipping costs for different countries around the world. First off, I want to reassure you that we are going to ship these pedals worldwide. This was always our plan from the beginning. We want to reach as many people as possible. As far as what it will cost, our plan is to have a shipping calculator built into the website so that you can check for yourself how much it will cost to ship the pedals to your country of origin.

On that same note, for those of you that live in the EU, we are doing something special. Instead of charging 379 Euros as we had originally intended, we are reducing the final European price to about 315-320 Euros (for the three pedal set). We are doing this because of VAT's. We realize that VAT's can really inflate the costs of products shipped from the U.S., and we wanted to get the Euro price as close to 379 as possible after VAT's. We hope those of you living in the EU will appreciate this decision.

Closing Statement

This announcement was not meant to be a "big" one. I just felt that it was time to let the public know what we have been up to, and what our plans were for the immediate future. I've received a ton of emails with kind words of encouragement from many of you, and that tells me that we are headed in the right direction. I cannot stress enough how important this first product is to us. We know a lot of you are watching, and we want to make sure that we get this right. We hope that you will understand our decision to delay this release, and we want to stress that we made this decision for the good of the product.

Sincerely,

Chris Smith - Co-Founder - ProtoSimTech
http://www.protosimtech.com

 

Awesome stuff about the Euro prices, thanks a bunch. I think a lot of people who were doubting about that have no reservations left.

Really curious as to what you changed on the clutch, also the reasons why. Are you planning to shoot a video about that?
Thanks for the update

About the loadcell, I'm indeed very curious what you mean there. As you probably know yourself the loadcell itself does nothing in terms
of feel, it's the system which presses down it which does, right? If I was a trained professional (keep on dreaming) who is used to braking at a 100kg, and setting
up the pedal to do just that, what happens when the loadcell breaks down/malfunctions? Replacement under warranty? A little headroom won't hurt, or having the choice for
it. I'll await your video on the subject though

 

We are planning on doing a video that should explain why we are changing the clutch mechanism. We found a much better way to handle the feel of a real clutch, and we wanted to implement this before release. Therefore, we are delaying the release just a bit until we have this new mechanism finalized.

You are correct about the load cell. It's not the load cell's KG's that matter. It's all in how you set up the pedals. Keep in mind that if you're used to pressing on a brake pedal at 100KG's of force (not many people can actually do this during normal braking - it's much harder than you think), our brake pedal really wasn't designed to handle those kinds of forces. That said, you'll still be able to tweak the pedal so that you can press harder or softer and still maintain 4096 steps of resolution. I will go over this thoroughly in an upcoming video. Be sure to keep en eye out for that.

I hope that answers some of your questions. If not, I'm always here to help!

Also, for those of you that wanted to see our pedals in action, you can check them out in this latest video from SimRacingNC's YouTube channel. Check out the video below...

 

First CNC tests...

 

Cool stuff, curious to see it

That's a fair enough answer, if you want that kind of forces, maybe this pedal setup isn't for you, and that is fine, especially at this price point! Believe me I know how hard that is, as I know for a fact I can't press 100kg, let alone consistently throughout a race

 

Yeah, it's very tough to press that hard. In fact, i believe F1 drivers are required to press as hard as 150KG's. Don't quote me on that, I can't remember exactly.

Here's the first aluminum test cuts...

 

Hey guys,

This is a special tool that will be included with all new pedal sets. Enjoy!