By Greg Lipscomb
Have you ever been playing an xbox game, and feel the rumble in your hands, and think to yourself, “It sure would be cool to have a rumble pack in a mouseâ€. My friend thought this, and he proceeded to make the very first Rumble Mouse 1. An in-depth walkthrough of this project can be found at [Zerosign].
As you can see from this site, he used a large rumble pack, a nine volt battery, and a ball scroll mouse. I saw this, and remembered my days as an Electrical Engineer (I am stuck in my second year of medical school right now), and said, I could make my own rumble mouse, and make some improvements. Things I wanted to improve were; first, I had to have a LED mouse, second, I wanted to make everything fit in the mouse, and third, I wanted to power it off of the USB.
The first thing was to find a suitable mouse. I did not want to tear up any of my own mouses, so I went to Big Lots, and bought a cheap mouse for under ten dollars. I had some requirements. It had to be a large mouse, and had to have USB. I found one, and it is a pretty lame mouse, but is suitable for my project, and much else is cheap, and in my book, that is the most important thing.
The next step was to find a suitable motor for my mouse. I didn’t have a rumble pack to tear up, and thought the motor was too big anyway, as well as would draw too much current for my USB. (Note: I was afraid of frying my USB port, and almost did. I have a laptop, and that is scary.) I have kind of a bad habit of buying cell phones all of the time. Actually, my cell phones always die, and I have to buy new ones. This was the answer (actually, it was my wonderful fiancee that thought of it). Most cell phones run on 3.6 volts, and a USB is capable of supporting 5 volts. I tore apart my cell phone, and found the vibrator. It is incredible how small the thing is. I thought it was perfect.
You can see the tiny motor at the top right of the mouse. It looks like a watch battery, but it puts out a significant amount of vibration, for such a small unit. Note: You may want a vibration with a lower frequency, so if so, you would want a larger motor. I like the smaller motor with the higher frequency. It gives a good vibration, without shaking you to pieces. Now if you want to build your own rumble mouse, you may not have access to a cell phone, so I searched the internet and found them for only $1.25. You can find them here
http://www.allelectronics.com/cgi-bin/category.cgi?item=VB-1.
The next step was to tear apart my mouse. It was tricky to find the screw to pull it apart. It was hidden under a warranty sticker, so I pulled it off, and took the cover off of the mouse. Here is a picture of the inside of the mouse.
This looks perfect. I have plenty of room at the bottom of the mouse to work with, and it is a simple controller. You can see the switch at the top left of the circuit board.
Now if using USB power, it is important to find ground, as well as +5v. I had to research a pin-out of a USB port to find how it is set up. This is what I found at http://www.networktechinc.com/technote.html.
|
|||||
|
|
|
|
|
||
|
|
|
|
|
||
|
|
|
|
|
||
On a standard USB cable, if you look at it like you see in this diagram, the +5v is on the left, and the GND is on the far right. Now that is great and all, but I have to find these pins on the circuit board. I used a continuity checker on my digital multimeter, and found that Ground on my mouse is the green wire, and +5v on mine is the blue wire next to it.
You can look at this next picture at the underside of my circuit board. I found a common ground, which I have my green alligator clip on, and found my +5v which I have my yellow alligator clip on. I need these two points to run my vibrator motor. I can plug my mouse into usb, and connect my vibrator to these two points, and it will run. The only problem with that is that my motor is rated at 3v, so I need a resistor in. I will cover more on this in a minute.
If you look at the top two pins on the right, that are side by side, you will see that these are the two pins for my left mouse click switch. Using my multimeter, I found that the pin on the right is ground, and the one on the left is floating, with a higher voltage. The way this switch works, is when the left mouse button is clicked, it will bring my floating pin to low, or ground, and that low tells the mouse processor that the left mouse button has been pressed.
The question that remains is, how do I make my motor run when the left mouse button is clicked? You can’t just hook the motor to the switch, because I already said that both pins become grounded when the button is clicked. I need another switch that recognizes a low voltage as a signal to turn my motor on.
A transistor is just that.
Now there are two main types of transistors. One, a npn transistor, turns on when a high voltage is connected to the base. The other type is a pnp transistor, which will connect the collector and emitter when the base goes low. Here is a small schematic of a pnp transistor found at http://www.kpsec.freeuk.com/components/tran.htm.
You can see from this picture that the arrows are pointed in different directions. This tells the direction of the current flowing. Current flows High voltage to low voltage, or in other words from the “+†node to the “-“ node. I Connected my +5v from my USB to the E on my PNP, and connected the C to the “+†pole of my motor. The B, I connected to my floating pin on my left mouse button. I Connected the “-“ pole of my motor to the common ground. (Now I mentioned earlier needing a resistor, I put a 10K variable potentiometer between my C and the motor.)
This is confusing, but I will add a schematic, that you can follow. What this does for me, is when I click my button, the base goes low, and the motor vibrates. I can use my potentiometer to vary the resistance so that the voltage across the motor is 3v or less. I don’t want to burn the motor out during a fast game of Soldiers of Fortune. So here is a picture of how I tested my circuit.
If you look at the red wire connected to the circuit board. I could connect it to my floater pin, and push the button and it would run my motor which was still in the phone. Don’t follow the wires in this picture to wire up your transistor, but follow the schematic. This is just an idea of how I wired it up. It actually worked. Be careful on finding the correct common ground. I connected my ground at first to the grounded side of my LED, and my mouse died. I thought I killed it, or worse that I killed my USB. Luckily I rebooted the computer, and it worked again. That was a sigh of relief. So my advice is to stay away from the LED circuits.
After getting my circuit to work, I soldered everything together, and packed it into the mouse. Here is a picture of the final mouse.
In this picture, you can see the variable potentiometer that is going to the motor. I hope you all enjoyed this walkthrough of my Rumble Mouse 2. It works pretty well, and is a blast to play a first person shooter game. Now a necessary thing, which I did not do, but might do, is to connect a switch in the circuit. There will definitely be times that you do not want to use your rumble mouse. If you want to do this, it is easy. Just place it inline between your variable potentiometer, and your motor. It is probably best to have a slide switch, and you can cut a hole on the bottom of the mouse, so you can switch it on from the underside. This way, you don’t have any unsightly switches visible from your mouse. Leave comments if you enjoyed this How-to project.
Parts list
1 PNP transistor – 2N3906 (Radioshack #276-1604)
1 10K micropot – (271-282) – though, it is a little too big… maybe a 5k or 1k
1 PC board – ICB90 (276-0148)
1 Sanko Electric vibrating motor ( Sanko Electric # 1E120). Follow the link in the article. I doubt radioshack carries motors of this size
16 Responses to “Rumble Mouse”
Leave a Reply
Feel free to leave comments here
This Project is Sweet! Can you make me one?
Yeah, I can make you one. If you would like me to make you a rumble mouse, then email me at lipscgr@gmail.com, and I will discuss it with you.
*edit-Janurary 24, 2006* – I am really busy this semester in my second year of medical school. I won’t be able to make anybody a mouse until July of 2006. I will make one for $20 for the mods, which includes any parts. This would not include the price of a mouse or shipping.
Hey this is awesome! Can you tell me the exact parts list (transistor make, resistors etc. etc.)? (This for my “daily” trip to radio shack)
1 PNP transistor – 2N3906 (276-1604)
1 10K micropot – (271-282) – though, it is a little too big… maybe a 5k or 1k
1 PC board – ICB90 (276-0148)
1 Sanko Electric vibrating motor ( Sanko Electric # 1E120). Follow the link in the article. I doubt radioshack carries motors of this size.
[...] My friend at http://www.zerosign.net made this, and it is a fun project. Who doesn’t love the simpsons? This would be nice if you had a large storage device, maybe a gig or so. You could store some mp3s on your homer drive. It appears that he designed his red LED to stay on all the time, but he could have also made it come on when he was accessing data. If he would have used the two usb pins in the middle, they are only active when data is being written to the device. He could have connected them through a transistor, much like in my rumble mouse product. But, he would have probably wanted a NPN transistor, rather than a PNP, because the NPN acts like a switch when the base voltage is high. I won’t rehash all of that, you can read about it in my rumble mouse section at http://www.diylive.net/?p=9. Here is the description he gave at dig(”MMmmmmm…data” Cool write up on the making of the first Homer Simpson USB storage device. 128MB of sweet, geeky goodness.) [...]
this is gay
Did you talk about the 5volt-3volt regulation? I must’ve missed it
hello sir,
im vijay doin my 3rd year in ECE in PSG COLLEGE OF TECHNOLOGY.i would be really greatfull to u if u can provide us with the pin details of the microcontrollers of nokia 2600 model,as we r indulged in a project which involves the
knowledge of it.you can post it through my email address which i have specified above.
thank you very much.
Any chance of a better schematic?
Thanks for sharing
I’d prefer reading in my native language, because my knowledge of your languange is no so well. But it was interesting! Look for some my links:
Flash USB Drives: Backup Easily, Conveniently And Securely
Tired of switching CD/DVD discs while backing up? Flash USB drives to the rescue!
I completely agree with all that here is told
So you can find the information on it on my search resource
http://fileshunt.com
I am going to build one that works exactly like the original iFeel MouseMan from Logitech… hence, the force effects will be unique. Different objects will each have their own special “feel”. I will write code (and use as much prewritten code there is available from multiple sources) and key off of predetermined desktop and browser elements as well as generate signature feedback effects for all videogames and imaging applications. I will even make sure you can “feel” movies via Immersion’s audio interface.
By the way, if anyone can assist me in any way, I will cut you in on my company’s launch of the product!
Nice topic, thanks
____________________
p/s/
My new site for rapidshare http://www.melohunt.com
I would like to give the benefit of my experience to you.