Review: LED rpm rev/shift lights with SLI-Pro from Sim Dynamics

led rev lights for fanatec dd2

I’ve been driving with these rev lights attached to my Fanatec DD2 for some months now. In fact, I used them for the Daytona 24h with the Porsche 911 RSR thanks to Simon at Sim-Dynamics getting them to me in a hurry as usual (thanks mate).

What we have is basically a really good deal: £230 / $315 for a very bright set of RPM rev light LEDs with a carbon fibre eGlass mount drilled and ready for the Fanatec DD2 / DD1.

SLI-PRO and box

In the box, you get a USB cable, with the same threaded connection shroud supplied with wheels from Cube Controls:

Rear facing with threaded USB shroud
Rear facing with threaded USB shroud

Very nice and neat indeed. You also get the correct size bolts that are countersunk ready for the pre-drilled holes in the carbon fibre eGlass mount.

SLI-PRO led dash

It’s really nicely assembled, as you would expect with the high-end Leo Bodnar sourced RPM display board and aluminium case.

But, to buy those bits and make your own, you’d be looking at £194 + shipping just for the display and case. That’s before you’ve had a chance to source the USB socket and cable and make the carbon fibre eGlass rear panel and bracket, which is cleverly sized to enable you to view the contents of your DD2 display:

showing the dd2 screen visibility through a hole in the bracket
Welcome message is programmable: this looks like “Sunday Maniacs” – good sim racing team name I think

So it’s a pretty good deal! Here it is in action:

RPM lights for sim racing

What’s really nice about this system is that the LEDs are highly visible and, with SimHub (my dashboard software of choice), you can assign switches on your steering wheel to page through useful data on the right and left-hand display. Data such as deltas, session timing, lap number, lap remaining, water temp and more. Setup correctly it can save a lot of messing around with the black box in iRacing.

Setup

Installation is trivially easy. You’ll just need to mount it to the front of your Fanatec DD wheel with the screws provided. You’ll need a spare USB socket too.

To set up software driving the display, I opted for Simhub. It’s free (or very cheap), highly usable and has out of the box compatibility with most sim racing simulators and games. It can do a lot of cool stuff, so if you’ve never come across it before, read my how-to here to get it installed and started.

simhub
Simhub

The important bit to be aware of is out of the box, Simhub won’t recognise the SLI-Pro – you need to install a driver. Fortunately, there is a good one thanks to Trey Ulbrak who developed the the “SLI Plugin” for Simhub. Download the zip files from Github here.

Installation:

Firsly, download and extract the zip file.

Copy the package\bin\x86\Release\SimElation.SimHub.SliPlugin.dll file from the package to your SimHub installation directory: e.g. C:\Program Files (x86)\SimHub) and (re)start SimHub.

Copy the SimElation.SimHub.SliPlugin.dll file to this location

When you start SimHub, it should ask for confirmation to enable the new plugin, allow it.

That’s basically it!

Configuration is available in SimHub at Additional Plugins then the SLI Plugin tab.

From here you can set LED brightness, welcome message and map steering wheel buttons to page through data on the right and left side of the display.

SIMhub car settings
SIMhub car settings

Then, head to car settings (from the left hand navigation) to adapt the RPM light behaviour. It helps just to take the car out and tweek the max rpm manually so the shift warning co-incides with a near redline event. It takes a bit of time but once it works, it works well.

Check out more documentation on the driver and the shift display settings on the Github package page and go and grab yourself the complete dash from Sim-Dynamics here.

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Review: LED rpm rev/shift lights with SLI-Pro from Sim Dynamics