Do Ya Feel It? That's Haptics, Kid!

Lots of good progress today on the haptics project. Cicek covers the "heartbeat" and "shotgun" assignments, complete with video.

The heartbeat is fairly straightforward. The Arduino kicks out two 50ms bursts of the vibrators motors separated by 10ms, followed by a 500ms pause. The second burst is at 75 percent of the duty cycle coming off the PWM. It's eerily effective.

The shooter took us a while to perfect, but I think we've got a good one. The best way to see what we've done with it is to check the source code (attached below,) but the gist of it is that we start off with a heavy vibration from both the mini-vibrating motor (in the grip) and our custom-built macro-vibrating motor. The latter is a generic DC motor with an offset weight hot-glued to the shaft contained inside the top of an old spray can and attached to the area where the "bolt" would be on a rifle. Then we added another pulse from another mini located downrange on the barrel. By tweaking the timings, you get a fairly good sense of the gun kicking when you hit the cute red trigger.

We also have the bounce assignment sort of worked out in code, though I think we'll need to get more detail on it from Yury to see exactly what we need to build there.

All three are contained in the attached code (not very efficient, but easy to distribute.) With a bit on ingenuity, you could make all three programs available using a set of switches or knobs and using only one set of motors. But the forms are really the most interesting part.

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haptics1.pde1.76 KB

Copyright Mike Edwards 2006-2009. All content available under the Creative Commons Attribution ShareAlike license, unless otherwise noted.