Forza-TCS

Hardware-based traction control system for the Forza Motorsport & Forza Horizon games.

It uses a M5Stack-CoreS3 to receive telemetry data from the game over WiFi. It then acts as a USB Keyboard and sends commands to the Xbox when traction is broken.  

Arduino/M5 setup

• Follow the docs to set up the Arduino IDE and install the libs
• Enable USB-OTG mode under the Ardunio tools menu

 

Intro

The Forza Motorsport and Forza Horizon games provide an interesting "data out" feature. This transmits realtime telemetry data via UDP.

This project captures that data on an ESP32, reads the traction information from each tyre, and uses that to kill the cars throttle if too much (configurable) slip is detected. In this case, it does so by applying the clutch. Ideal would be to "let go" of the throttle instead, still thinking about a good way to do that!

 

How it works

The main loop reads the telemetry data from the game. We look at the slip rate for each tyre and decide if the car is in a state of understeer or oversteer. If oversteering, and tyre slip rate is over a certain percentage, we kill power to the cars throttle by applying the cltuch.

 

Configuring

Look for the // Configurables section of ftcs.ino:

• Set your WiFi name and password in creds.h
• TCsensitivity controls how much slip the program will allow before killing throttle
• TCspeed controls the speed above which traction control will kick in - you want a little slip at low speeds to avoid bogging down launches
• actionString is what we send to the "keyboard" when traction is lost. Right now its the 'z' key which I have bound to clutch. You probably need to change this.

 

Usage

• Once connected OK, the display will show the IP address and port you need to enter in your Forza HUD "data out" settings
• Plug the device into your Xbox's USB port
• The display will also show the amount of Forza packets it is processing per second. This should be around 60 since Forza sends telemetry data at 60 frames per second
• The "L" and "R" values on the display show the amount of slip at each rear wheel in real time

 

Contributions..

.. are welcome! This is really just a PoC but could probably be iterated over to the point where it would actually be quite good. Feel free to open a PR.

 

Credits

Thank you to:

• https://github.com/richstokes/Forza-data-tools (This other project of mine is helpful for learning the Forza data format if you'd like to create something similar or learn more)