The sim rig

• I race under Covert Motorsports. Covert is my middle name.
• Not competitive: test drives, hot laps, and a lot of tuning. The realism is the hobby.
• Home Assistant powers up the motion platform. One trigger brings the rig to life and Pit Wall starts tracking whoever’s in the seat.

The hardware

• Motion: a DOF Reality H6 six-axis platform driven through SimHub, with five motion profiles I tuned myself.
• Feel: bass shakers on a 7.1 sound card, so kerbs, gear shifts and the engine come through the seat.
• Controls: Moza wheel base and mBooster pedals.
• Vision: a Meta Quest 3 over Virtual Desktop for VR, or the ultrawide monitor.

Automation

The rig is one Home Assistant script away from a race, and it’s careful about shutting down.

• Start: the script powers up the PC and launches iRacing and SimHub. The motion gear only powers on once Home Assistant sees iRacing actually running. It waits for the controllers to appear, enables motion, and alerts me if it isn’t active within 90 seconds. Trigger to moving takes about 30 seconds.
• Stop: 15 seconds after the sim closes, audio switches back, the platform parks, and only then is the power cut. The platform is worm-gear driven, so cutting power mid-move leaves it stuck wherever it was.
• Nobody driving: if the gear is on and nobody drives for 15 minutes, it powers down.
• Positive evidence only: a sensor that’s “unavailable” never counts as “stopped”. I learned that one when the power cut out mid-race.
• Audio follows the display: when iRacing falls back from VR to the monitor, sound follows it.
• Reset: one action parks the platform, power-cycles the gear and brings motion back, for when a controller hangs.
• A wall-mounted iPad dashboard shows the PC and gear at a glance.