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Are you playing in bare feet?!

Am I the only one playing in gloves and boots? 

What we need is some sort of two way ratchet that goes clunk when it changes position. I'll keep thinking about it. I've designed a lever arrangement much like you've shown above, but it has a positive centre stop so the lever always stops smartly in the centre like you would expect a bike to. I'll have a go at printing it this week and see how it goes.

My current goals are, limited movement on a positive stop, buttons working at the ends of the lever travel, always stop cleanly in the centre with little wobble.

If that all goes well, I'll add a hall effect sensor (use the in game preload function, although ultimately I want that to be a physical thing so I'll write an algorithm to handle it externally via servos) for analog input, and then figure out a 'block' for up and down when in 1st and top.

After spending some time riding around thinking about what really defines a motorcycle gearshift, it's those things, plus of course the clunk. Let me know if you see a mechanism that might replicate the clunk, I've no good ideas at this point and are just relying on a bass shaker. The closest I can think of is a firing mechanism from a rifle, with the wall and break.

Yeah I've wondered about magnets for that. What didn't work out with those?

What provides the self centering? Just the buttons?

Definitely more distinct on some than others. CBR1000RR, quite distinct, RGV, reasonably distinct, 748R not much at all, SV1000 not much either. Do you have an email address, I could send you an STL if you like. Cable driven, hall effect sensor.

Next up is the gear shift. All the bikes have that distinct feeling of metal moving and notching into place, I want that. I've been working the various levers with my eyes closed trying to come up with what might replicate that, but no great ideas so far. I know I want a detent to click through, and the other thing is I want the detent tension to be load (engine load) sensitive. I want to be able to preload the lever like I would on a real bike, then back off the gas to let it snick into the next gear, like you would on a bike without a shift lever. Keen to hear any thoughts you might have on that. I think it can be done by the Arduino handling the TPS input, rather than having to receive telemetry via SimHub or whatever.

@mdlp Yes I know what you mean, replicate that 'chonk' as you click into first. The bike itself doesn't move (although I understand why that's probably not a bad way to replicate it, it uses existing mechanics you already paid for!), so I was thinking maybe a servo that lets a weight swing and hit a stop. That will require telemetry though, to know which gear you're in.

I'm quite keen to build a motion rig at some point, but I want to pick off all this low hanging 'immersion' fruit first.

Chris, have you done anything WRT making the clutch feel right? I've seen a couple of things on here where people have used simple return springs, but clutches don't feel like that, the pressure plate has a tip over point that you can feel.