And the beat goes on…

After much faffing around i ported the PWM/RNG software to a PIC10F222 since I had some lying around and they are a little more suitable for this project. This involved a bit of wire sculpture between 2 DIP8 sockets to make an adaptor for the Low Pin Count board but was doable.

The next thing was to have a go at controlling a push-pull solenoid. The idea is to create a more controllable vibration generation system so that things like triaxial accelerometers or gyros can be connected to 3 orthogonally arranged vibration sub assemblies to give different sensations depending on movement of the user (or the movement of someone, or something else *insert imagination here*). An eccentrically wieghted motor generates a conical vibration pattern which has all sorts of problems with inertia and also vibrates in 2 rotational axes. One solution would be to get a motor which has a spindle out of each end (similar to those used in model rail, HO, OO scale would be a good start but those used in N and Z scales are tiny enough to have al sorts of possibilities) and attach a weight to each end of the shaft such that the weights are coaxial and that that axis is parallel to the axis of rotation. This would give vibration in 2 linear axis. Far better is to have an inertial mass being oscillated along one axis only. Which is where a push-pull, or more accurately opposed pull-pull, solenoid comes in.

As you can see from the above pic, the board with PIC (10F222), the psu board and a driver board (consisting of 2 MOSFETs, 2 1N4004s and 2 1M res) are connected by a handful of wires together and to a pair of solenoids attached to a base and whose shuttles have been wired together. The code was so short that it didn’t even go off the bottom of the screen (I say to all you people who write programmes in the Mb and Gb range, PAH!!) It takes in the ADC value from the input connected to the pot and uses that to change the time between and duration of the pulses going to the 2 solenoids making the combined shuttles shoot back and forth at a contorted rate. These solenoids are 12V and are not very good with the 9V battery I have to hand so a small lead acid bat will need to be ordered (and possibly some smaller solenoids)

next :

Since I’m doing this in totally the wrong order (more to do with what piece of technology i get my hands on next) the next fun thing is GPS. Just need to write some code to take the data from the GPS unit and then interpret that in a cleaver way, but as you see the thing is rather impressively small (reception inside a person may pose a problem so this may have to be connected to a small RF link like ZigBee or bluetooth and put in a location with more skyview, like a hat).

Anyhoo… Onwards!!!!

This entry was posted on 23/08/2007 at 10:54 pm and is filed under intelligent vibrator. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response or trackback from your own site.

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