FX Unleashed: Free & Open source Custom Dashes, Light Profiles & SimHub Support for the FX Pro
Before I start, this is in NO WAY meant to overstep on Simagic's intellectual property, this is purely a fan project meant to expand the usability of a product me and many other owners love!
About a week ago, I made a post on a simple plugin I made that was meant to auto sync the RPM lights on the FX Pro to the sims. After seeing the reception on that, It confirmed my guess that there are many other FX Pro users out there that LOVE their wheel but are frustrated by the same thing I'm frustrated by: Amazing hardware that is extremely limited in customizability due to only being locked down to SimPro only. As a company, continuing to add dashes, light profile and functionality to an aging product is understandably not a priority and although Simagic has been putting out some fire new wheels (I'm getting that round Zues wheel sooner or later), I'm still not ready to give up my FX Pro!
With all of that said, I would like to introduce you to my latest creation: FX Unleashed: A free and open source plugin that is coupled with custom wheel firmware that allows your PC to fully take control of the wheels functionality over USB
Every button and light on the FX Pro has FULL RGB support but SimPro limits you to only setting a colors out of a select palate.
And although there is a great selection of dashes built into to the wheel, they suffer from really slow update rate and 0 support for custom dashes. Through FX Unleashed, you'll be able to dynamically load/unload dashes as well as design your own and share them with the community!
Screenshots from the plugin: https://fxunleashed.com/screenshots/
Features:
- Full Light profile support directly through the plugin with presets and the ability to create your own, as well as support for allowing ATSR to drive the wheel (custom ATSR wheel profile included)
- Web based dash designer that supports importing SimHub dashes to use as a starting point
- Control over the "Switch dash" button, now you can bind it to anything!
- Near 0 perceivable latency on data on the wheel for lights and dashes
- Support for custom screensavers
- OBS support, for content creators that want to show their dashes on their video/live stream
- Dash library that allows the community to share dashes
- Auto RPM light syncing with sim data through Lovely data
- This is fully reversable, you can flash Simagic's original firmware and its back to factory. And even with custom firmware, connected to the wheel base (RF) works exactly like the original
- Fully open source, this opens up the opportunity for all of us to add new functionality!
Cons:
- This requires flashing custom firmware on the wheel & screen. Although I had no issues during this process (flashed over 15 times during the process of creating this), flashing firmware always comes with risks like bricking your wheel, so do it at your own risk
- Due to the limitation of the update rate on this screen, full SimHub dash support is not possible, I've created a few dashes (some converted and some original) and the tools to create more and convert Simhub dashes but would need the help of the community to add more!
- Wheel must be wired for this to work, RF is not fast enough
A quick summery of what you'll need to do to get this up and running
- Connect the wheel through USB
- I would highly recommend if you have the wheel on the base, to connect it through one of those USB hubs that have individual toggles for each port, and turn off the wheels port. This will cut power to the wheel but will keep sending data. Safer to only have one power source to the wheel
- Download the custom firmware and flash it through SimPro
- Download and install the plugin on SimHub
- (Optional but HIGHLY recommended) Flash the screen custom firmware, I simplified it so its just a button you press on the plugin's SimHub interface, takes ~15 seconds to install
- What that does is it gives the PC the ability to manages the screen RAM, so we can preload images and make the time to switch between dashes down from a few seconds where the PC has to draw the image at 25 kb/s to almost instantly
- You're all set! Pick any of the dashes or make new ones. I also included a Claude slash command (/create-dash) that has all the know how on how to create optimized dashes that would work great on the wheel, you can use this to convert SimHub dashes to ones that work on the wheel
I'm more than happy to answer any questions here or on discord, I will repeat, please be very careful and do this at your own risk, I will be here to support though.!
Find all the info you need to get this setup, in addition to the discord server in https://fxunleashed.com/
For those who are curious on the technicality of this:
Most of the communication between the PC and the wheel happens through the wheel base, which contains a limited set of instructions that could be sent to the wheel. USB mode exists but is mainly meant for updating the wheel, etc and not much else. What this custom firmware does is it gives the PC the ability to directly set LED state and send draw commands to the screen. When we couple that with the super easy to install screen firmware, we also gain access to manage the screen's ram (the screen has a separate micro controller that the wheel communicates with) we get the ability to preload images . The main limitation is even with this USB-C connection, we can communicate with the screen at about 25 kb/s, which is pretty limiting and requires careful consideration in what we're sending, so being able to preload images allows us to show much higher quality images almost for free! Simagic's built in dashes live in the screen's firmware, we have access to that as well but requiring firmware flashes every time someone wants to add a custom dash is a horrible solution, so ram preloading is MUCH safer, faster and more dynamic. The few bundled dashes use less than 5 kb/s, so its very possible to make great looking dashes with minimal bandwidth
I was very intentional to not touch the bootloader or any of the core functionality of the wheel, this is a purely additive patch to minimize the risk of interfering with any of the wheel's core functionality or ability to reflash at any time.