Vibrating Headphone ?

Raithah · Post by **Raithah** » Wed May 14, 2008 10:13 pm

I'm staring at the shattered remains of a cheap, airline headset when it hit me - Rez. Then it hit me again - I only listen to music through one ear (don't ask) !

Here's my question : should/could I hook up an op-amp circuit to one headphone (fed power through some other source, possibly USB), then feed that into a pager vibrator ? Or would you figure that the unamplified signal would be powerful enough ?

Edit: Once again it has struck me. Could an electric toothbrush motor be used here - it'd make sense that they draw less power and are significantly easier to obtain.

hdx · Post by **hdx** » Thu May 15, 2008 6:35 am

You sould use vibrating motor from mobile phones. They're small and easy to get.

bacteria · Post by **bacteria** » Thu May 15, 2008 8:50 am

How about a rumble motor from a GameCube controller? (not an N64 one as they have a rotating block on them). Needs 3v.

Post by **gannon** » Thu May 15, 2008 9:32 am

You *could* buy the headphones Ben designed

But if the headphones are the larger kind, you can easily fit some small rumble motors and control circuitry in them, would need a battery for voltage source though. I'd guess you'd want something to trigger the motors with the bass?

I'd just feed it to a transistor to give it a solid voltage at a given input

APHawkes · Post by **APHawkes** » Thu May 15, 2008 11:54 am

I'm assuming you'd want a pass filter so that it only tried to rumble on lower frequencies? I dunno if it would matter.

Raithah · Post by **Raithah** » Thu May 15, 2008 5:22 pm

GameCube ? Huh, it never occurred to me but there's a controller on sale for a couple bucks at the local supermarket. I'll give that a shot once I've some money :D.

Ben Heckendorn made headph-whoah. That's eerily similar to what I originally had in mind, but toned down once I realized how annoying it'd be to have my ears jiggled to hell and back. It'll be similar to the Rez 'vibrator' in that I'll put the haptic portion into another device to be held or pocketed. I was hoping for a dynamic response to sound - stronger vibrations at higher strength becoming accordingly weaker at a lower volume. I'm just now realizing how hard that'd be, so I'll probably just make it trigger at a certain volume.

Well, with all that in mind I guess I'll have to start drawing up some circuits for this beast. Wish me luck.