The idea of using motors for the development of haptic controls is not new, but the possibility of using them in everyday design practices by interaction designers is a really good excuse to put effort in developing more of these tools

This on-line exhibition shows some examples we have developed hacking into the Wiring i/o board by Hernando Barragan reprogramming it in C in order to create a collection of libraries that would allow us to do special haptic functions on the motors

We have prepared 5 short clips that show how these functions work. In future releases of Wiring it will be possible to include external C libraries and we hope that our work will become a demo kit for developing Haptic controls using DC motors with encoders

On top of the i/o board we have used our own design, the motor control board that can control up to two motors with their respective cross-by-zero encoders

Video Demos

These videos exemplify different ways of controlling a rotary knob, note that this documentation is under construction and that it belongs to IDII and Potsdam Fachhochschule, therefore if you plan to use it, you should refer to them for crediting the right institutions

- Video 1: a knob rotates toggling direction through direct touch

- Video 2: another example of the touch detection

- Video 3: negative force-feedback (assisted movement)

- Video 4: negative force-feedback with touch-to-stop event

- Video 5: combination of different kinds of feedback in a position based behavior

(coming soon: video demos of our communication server sending data from an RFID card reader straight into a flash program)

Acknowledgements

For this exhibit we have to thank IDII and PotsDam Fachhochschule for choosing ... US!! ... and all the support from its members: Massimo, Eduardo, Vitoria, Heather, Manuela, Reto, and all the others. To the students that passed by our cold corner in the laboratory: Dave and James for their inspiring radio, Giovanni and his pizza, Nick "endless stomach" Zambetti ... To the guys at K3 that gave a hand with the last soldering: Dan and Marcus, there are not enough "ny potatisar" in the world to pay for your help.