Enabling the Power LED on the G25/G27 Shifter

If you’ve followed my instructions to build a DIY USB adapter for your Logitech G25 or G27 shifter, you might have noticed something that may seem a little odd: the power LED doesn’t light up!

Don’t worry, nothing is broken and you haven’t done anything wrong – it’s normal that the power LED doesn’t turn on with these adapters. The power LED has its own pin, and since it’s not needed in order to read from the shifter I didn’t add it to the tutorial. But don’t fret! I can show you how to turn on the power LED, and even how to control it from the Arduino for some fun effects.

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How to Build a DIY Logitech G25 Shifter USB Adapter

Compared to a modern Logitech wheel, the Logitech G25 probably looks quite dated. Instead of covering the face of the wheel with inputs, the designers at Logitech opted to simplify the wheel itself and move most of controls to the attached shifter. In addition to its six gear H-pattern, the shifter has eight programmable action buttons, a directional pad, and the ability to transform into a sequential shifter. The modern Driving Force shifter, compatible with Logitech’s modern range of wheel bases, has the same shifting hardware but lacks these incredibly useful spare inputs. Unfortunately the shifter itself doesn’t have a USB output, which makes it difficult to use standalone without the matching wheel.

If you still have your Logitech G25 shifter, there is a way to get it working without a wheel. I’m going to show you how to build your own DIY USB adapter in under 15 minutes using only a handful of parts. This is an easy project and requires absolutely no soldering.

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How to Build a DIY Logitech G27 Shifter USB Adapter

Compared to a modern Logitech wheel, the Logitech G27 probably looks quite dated. Instead of covering the face of the wheel with inputs, the designers at Logitech opted to simplify the wheel itself and move most of controls to the attached shifter. In addition to its six gear H-pattern, the shifter has eight programmable action buttons and a directional pad. The modern Driving Force shifter, compatible with Logitech’s modern range of wheel bases, has the same shifting hardware but lacks these incredibly useful spare inputs. Unfortunately the shifter itself doesn’t have a USB output, which makes it difficult to use standalone without the matching wheel.

If you still have your Logitech G27 shifter, there is a way to get it working without a wheel. I’m going to show you how to build your own DIY USB adapter in under 15 minutes using only a handful of parts. This is an easy project and requires absolutely no soldering.

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How to Build a DIY Logitech Pedals USB Adapter

The new Logitech racing wheels come in two parts: the wheel “base” which contains the steering wheel proper, and an add-on peripheral with gas, brake, and clutch pedals. This pedal peripheral is quite well built with a metal frame, aluminum pedal faces, and user swappable springs. It even has mounting points for hanging the pedals upside-down or attaching them to a sim racing rig. Despite these perks, the pedals cannot function on their own – they must be plugged into the wheel base in order to work over USB. If you want to use these pedals with a different wheel setup, you need some sort of USB adapter.

I’m going to show you you can how to build your own DIY USB adapter for these Logitech pedals in under 15 minutes using only a handful of parts. This is an easy project and requires absolutely no soldering.

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How to Build a DIY Logitech Shifter USB Adapter

The Logitech Driving Force shifter is an awesome piece of kit. It’s small, stylish, robust, and inexpensive. But unfortunately it has one major drawback: it’s dumb! It has no “smart” electronics whatsoever, just a simple DB-9 connector that absolutely must be plugged into a Logitech wheel base unit in order to function. If you (like me) don’t happen to have a fancy Logitech racing wheel, you have to come up with some other way of connecting the shifter to your PC.

I’m going to show you you can how to build your own DIY adapter in under 15 minutes using only a handful of parts. This is an easy project and requires absolutely no soldering.

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Sim Racing Shields for Arduino

I recently put together a library for interfacing Arduino development boards with sim racing devices such as shifters, pedals, and handbrakes. The library makes it easy to retrieve the relevant data from those devices and send it to a racing simulator. The only catch is that the user has to carefully wire things up themselves, which is a little tedious and results in a somewhat messy final product.

To close that gap, I designed some custom sim racing “shields” which attach to the underside of an Arduino and make it quick and easy to connect to existing sim racing devices.

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Sim Racing Library for Arduino

Simulator racing tech is amazing. It’s an entire genre of human input devices designed to transform your home desk into the cockpit of a racecar. Wheels, pedals, shifters, handbrakes, gauge clusters, wind generators… you name it, you can find it for your home racing rig.

But with all of the hardware necessary for a comprehensive simulator experience, sim racing is expensive. To try and make it more accessible, communities of makers have sprung up to design their own custom racing devices and adapters built from scratch. Owning a bit of sim racing equipment myself, I thought I would join in on the fun and design a software library that makes it easy to interface sim racing devices with embedded development boards. Introducing the Sim Racing Library for Arduino!

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Teensy 4.0 Minimalist USB Host Shield

When the Teensy 4.0 development board hit the market in late 2019 it blew the doors off the place. Sporting a blazing fast 600 MHz ARM processor, 2 megabytes of flash memory, and over 40 I/O pins, at only an inch and a half long it packs a serious punch in a (Teensy) tiny package.

One of the awesome features of this board is its built-in USB host capability. This allows the microcontroller to talk to other USB devices such as human interface devices (mice, keyboards, joysticks), MIDI controllers, and even other development boards over USB serial. While some previous boards such as the Teensy 3.6 had this feature, this is the first Teensy board to include USB host functionality in a small format package.

To take advantage of this awesome new feature, I decided to design a minimalist USB host shield for the Teensy 4.0.

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