Hardware Hack: Pandora RUMBLE Edition

[mcobit]

Hello everyone!


As my touchscreen is broken and the casing of my Pandora is held together by only two screws, I decided I couldn't break anything more and opened it again.


I had a small nokia vibrationmotor from an old cellphone at hand and thought, that it would be cool, if the Pandora could do vibration.


This is the motor:

I found a good place for it to rest right by the stylusholder:

I glued it there with some paper as padding and soldered the contacts with some small wire to the kb_bl pads on the Pandoraboard.


I know that the hackermanual says, that these pads were not tested for inductive stuff, but hey, why not try it


The motor can operate happily from 1.0 to 3.7V so this should be fine.

Then I secured and insulated the contacts of the motor with some stickytape and put the Pandora back together.

After starting up, I wrote a little testscript, that does some stuff with the motor and everything seems to work just fine


You can see (or hear) it in the video. Please turn up the volume!

https://www.youtube.com/embed/8my6sgjt8wE?feature=oembed

The vibration is really good and goes through the whole case. The motor can be operated with the values ~50 - 255 in /sys/class/leds/pandora::keypad_bl/brightness.


I wonder why the Pandora has no vibration from the get got, but it seems to be easily addable.


Hope you enjoy.


Next I will try to modify a game to use this feature for haptic feedback.


Stay tuned!

 

[mvickers03]

Nice work! Would be cool to integrate into some games

 

[Askarus]

Great work.


I don't want it in my Pandora because I hate rumble but nice hack.

 

[erico]

Excellent hack Mcobit!


...next, force feedback?


Really great stuff, I myself can´t quite even change a light bulb, I have something with electricity

 

[elwing]

I wonder why the Pandora has no vibration from the get got,

easy, it's not round enough

 

[Askarus]

Do you have already some use for it?

 

[iprice]

That's a really cool addition


Hopefully it will be a feature in the P2?

 

[mcobit]

Do you have already some use for it?

As said, currently there is nothing using it except for my script, but I think Ill try to use it in rrootage or something.

 

[mono]

cool!


You could build a bristol bot by adding a toothbruch


finally a good use!

 

[mcobit]

What I could do is to write a small lib where some effects are predefined and could be called with simple commands from programs that want to use them.

 

[Foxgod]

Theres a number of psx games that use rumble, such as metal gear solid.


Perhaps you can contact the owner of PSX rearmed to help you making use of your hack in the psx emulator.

 

[Linux-SWAT]

Rooo that's so easy ^^. Congrats.


I myself never use rumble because we will all get Parkinson's disease soon enough.

 

[FaeMinx]

Well done!


My Pandora isn't recieving any mods untill I own a P2... incase I screw up


But when I do this is a definite addition I would like to have.


That and a second set of shoulder buttons.


... and illuminated keyboard.


I'll be curious to see what applications will make use of this in the future.

 

[ingoreis]

Cool work;-)


Next will be a DVB-t mod:-D


I Found out that the usb-otg Port deliver enough energy to use my DVB-t Stick


from hauppauge and then can i maybe build it into my pandora.


Rumble on pandora is a cool idea and nice to see it working.;-)

 

[foxblock]

Very neat, good work!


Tell me how to call it from C++ code and I will add some rumble to one of my games!

 

[PokeParadox]

Make sure the rumble library has a toggle - if someone mods their Pandora keyboard to have a light, you will have a strobe show instead of rumble...

 

[notaz]

Make sure the rumble library has a toggle - if someone mods their Pandora keyboard to have a light, you will have a strobe show instead of rumble...

That's one of reasons those things need root - you have to manually chmod or the app has to ask for password instead or doing it behind your back.


BTW it wouldn't be hard to add it to PCSX as there is already some rumble code in for Caanoo.

 

[F_Slim]

That's pretty cool! I like rumbling-effects for Gamepads. Not sure how I'd like it when the screen is attached to the rumbling part though


It's nice to see such hacks. Also great to see how you devs immediately chime in and offer to put support for this hack into some of your programs, you guys rock!

 

[mcobit]

Would there even be a lib needed?


You can make bashscripts for various effects and call them with something like:


system ("nohup sh yourscript.sh &")


from a c or c++ application.

 

[WizardStan]

The vibration is really good and goes through the whole case. The motor can be operated with the values ~50 - 255 in /sys/class/leds/pandora::keypad_bl/brightness.

Does that actually change the amount of vibration? I know the power LED is at 100% brightness at about 54 or so (and 55-255 don't make it any brighter) so I'm just wondering if this is the same and the motor only works when getting 100% power. I know you can control motors with a PWM in general but I wonder if the motor is attempting to draw more power at lower values than the PWM can produce. If so, maybe we can find a different motor, or perhaps soldering it to one of the spare LED pads on the top of the board might make more sense. In any event, an excellent experiment and something that can probably be recommended for the P2