GC rumble motors

kasar · Post by **kasar** » Sat Sep 20, 2008 11:00 am

I was wondering how much power the gamecube motors drain, on my latest project, My portable has built in a gamecube controller with rumble motors (by default each controller have one motor built in but I added another motor in parallel) the case isnÂ´t as small as a controller, so I added two motors , one is allocated near the L trigger,joystick and + pad, and the other motor is allocated near a,b,y,x,z buttoms ,C joy and R trigger.

when I play games that not use rumble feature a lot, the battery life seems much longer, but today I played a game the controller rumble most of time and the battery life decreased a lot. also when it has arround 2 mins of battery remaining, when it rumble, the screen backlight turns weaker meanwhile rumble.

so I was wondering how much power the gamecube motors drain.

maybe its time to add a switch for turn on/off the rumble feature

Mario · Post by **Mario** » Sat Sep 20, 2008 11:27 am

Motors draw a lot of current. Who knows, maybe a couple hundred mA each!

Maybe you could use cell phone rumble motors, and put them in strategic places so you can feel it better.

kasar · Post by **kasar** » Sat Sep 20, 2008 12:02 pm

thanks mario.
yeah,I though about adding cell phones rumbles(I also posted it at tecknottÂ´s system topic

) , but anyway I dont have enough cell phones broken to add small rumbles to them, I think I will wait to get some cell phones, and meanwhile, I will make a system wich switch motors to a led, so when the led mode is on, the rumble turns off and it save battery, and when the led mode is off the system rumble.

when battery mode is running the led mode will be on.
and when ac mode rumble mode will be on.

seems I need to get a 3 pos switch and some resistor.

I supose the gamecube controller rumble works on 5v (the same go to the entire controller)

Bigmac · Post by **Bigmac** » Sat Sep 20, 2008 8:38 pm

I found some pretty cheap cellphone vibrate motors on ebay if you are interested:
http://cgi.ebay.com/Vibrate-Motor-Assem ... .m20.l1116

kasar · Post by **kasar** » Sun Sep 21, 2008 3:34 am

Bigmac wrote:I found some pretty cheap cellphone vibrate motors on ebay if you are interested:
http://cgi.ebay.com/Vibrate-Motor-Assem ... .m20.l1116

Thanks!

Aguiluz · Post by **Aguiluz** » Sun Sep 21, 2008 12:32 pm

I smashed laptop CD drives that were broken and laying around for nothing.

I then took the tiny motors and soldered a hunk of lead on it. Tiny rumblers!

kasar · Post by **kasar** » Sun Sep 21, 2008 1:18 pm

Aguiluz wrote:I smashed laptop CD drives that were broken and laying around for nothing.

I then took the tiny motors and soldered a hunk of lead on it. Tiny rumblers!

oh!

I have some of them,

,Time to give them a new life ^^

thank you