Making a seat force feedback

[fogman]

I am finished with my first cabinet (Yay!) after about a year of building and another 6 months of tweaking.

[Bones]

It's an interesting idea but I would imagine quite noisy!

Another good way do it would be to use compressed air which operates a pneumatic actuator. You could probably feed a signal into a solenoid valve to help control things. Again, a noisy option but would have slightly less moving parts. (No need for the clutch, pulley or drive belt.)

[shafor]

What about using an industrial vibrator.  It seems like this would be very easy to mount and it would require less space.

http://www.grainger.com/Grainger/productdetail.jsp?xi=xi&ItemId=1611786151&ccitem=

[Bones]

Those are used mainly to agitate product such as silos full of wheat. It's a very subtle vibration to keep things from sticking and difficult to control. They are designed to constantly run and don't perform well if constantly stop/started. They are available in a good range of sizes but again, they are very noisy.

The air operated units have a silencer port, but you still hear the sound of the little ball inside shaking away. It's the sort of thing you would need to wear ear protection if you were around it long enough.

[shafor]

granted they are used on shaker tables and such, however for this application it would be an easy and simple mod for a prototype.

[wj2k3]

How about using a bass shaker.  I am not sure what the force feedback signal looks like but it would seem possible to modify/amplify it to input into on of these. 

[shafor]

ding, ding, we have a winner.

[ErikRuud]

The earlier versions of the Tesla Pods at the BattleTech centers had subwoofer built into the back of the seat.  It was something like 14" wide.

It did a prety good job of providing feed back when your mech got hit.  The ejection sequence was pretty impressive!

[creatine28]

Found this, seems to be similiar to the base shaker thing.

It's on this page towards the bottom and it's only $10!

http://www.excess-solutions.com/closeouts.htm

Item ES2023 BWA-01 ExtraBass Body Woofer System
 

[Xiaou2]

  The bass shakers are truely awesome.   I found an Aura bass shaker set with mini amps on ebay for less than 100$.   Popped them under my pc chair... and fired mame up...

  The results:   At low volumes... the bass shake felt as powerfull as a 500 watt subwoofer at high volume!    Setting the maximum power to the shakers resulted in me hardly able to view the monitor - because I was bouncing arround and made the screen appear to be shaking all over the place!

 What makes it nice - is that you do not need the high volume to feel the power. .. whereas a subwoofer needs to move a lot of air to blast the bass vibrations.   In many situations, theres actually more vibration from the shakers...  because with a sub with low volume of air movement,  you lose the impact.   Bass shakers vibrate all the time... and you can feel every bit of it.

  Obviouslty, a real powerfull motor to move the seat is completly a different experience.  Out Runs shaker motor for instance, completely rocks.  Maybe you could use the same type if setup as outrun.

 Using a powerfull one direction motor, (and hacking a rumble pad) you could use a metal  link arm... that moves the seat on a set of rails left to right rapidly.  (simular to the old style trains)

 However... remember that mame currently does not support Force Feedback yet : (   

 I highly doubt that 10$ jobbie would be sufficent or comparable to the power of a real bass shaker.


 

 

[wboy]

Another cheap alternative....

http://cerebrex.com/Merchant2/merchant.mv?Screen=PROD&Store_Code=C&Product_Code=TAC&Category_Code=V

I swear these used to go for $30AUD at a local placed called Jaycar, but as its not listed on their website anymore, I assume they are out of stock.

Years ago I used to have the backpack version.  Used to play it with golden eye on the N64.  Playing for more than an hour (more so on hot days) you would feel very queezy at the end of it.  Good fun though.