Add some feedback to an original NES controller by making it vibrate. This feature is often known as Rumble Pak, a controller add-on for the Nintendo 64 which vibrated as a game feature. This version adds a small DC motor (in the upper right) with a screw soldered off-center to the motor shaft.
[Andy Goetz] and his friend built this as a robot controller, taking advantage of the latch and clock pins. Normally, nothing happens while both pins are held high, a signal that they easily patched into using an AND gate. This is actually a neat find, as the addition of an internal microcontroller could add bi-directional communication when the latch is high and the clock is strobed.
You KNOW it belongs on Hack-a-day when you see a quad-AND chip with its pins splayed flat, at an angle, and lead wires soldered straight to the pins!
I assume they’re using the LED as a traditional diode in this case?
Forrest M. Mims would be proud!
@Craig i see nothing wrong with this statement
Heck, I’m impressed with the screw soldered to the motor!
The whole thing rocks.
(Yeah I noticed the splayed legs on that IC too.)
‘sall good
can’t read values from the controller when it’s rumbling,…fail
how does it know when to rumble anyway
I agree with zool. What signals from the software does the controller read as a request to “rumble”?
Is it really that hard to follow the link and see if it provides further explanation?
@lib:
This project was originally for a simple bump bot. The control SW would toggle back and forth between poll button positions and vibration the motor.
Just replace the cable to get an extra wire and use it to feed a serial->parallel shift register (or the aforementioned uC) hooked to the same latch/clock/Vcc lines. Ta-da! full-duplex serial comms.
It’s how the “link” port in a Game Boy works.
But this rumble thing is simple and effective, like all great hacks :D
@xyz at first i skimmed the page on how it works, there’s no mention of how they get it to rumble from what’s happening in the game
i read the page again and realized it’s not for playing a game at all but for controlling their robot
it’s a deceptive thing to make a NES controller rumblepack hack and not even have it rumble when you’re playing an NES game
maybe should have added ‘robot controller’ in the title
I think the confusion is about what this is for – it appears this has little to do with NES games. This is a hack *only* for the controller. It will never “rumble” while playing a game. (correct me if I’m wrong.) It will only rumble when plugged into a DIY device which tells it to rumble. The hack was the fact that they got a rumbler to fit in the NES controller. To be honest, I don’t think there’s any game-related functionality to this yet. It’s totally hacker spirit though – dirty, haphazard, yet functional. Very cool.
@Craig –
Forrest Mims! Dude has a smoking hot daughter! Well, maybe not smoking hot, but she has done real science ON the topic of hot smoke…
He’s the guy who launched a hundred thousand careers over 40 years. He’s big on Intelligent Design, btw.
@ Zool, it does say it in the article blurb.
//[Andy Goetz] and his friend built this as a robot controller//
What if they just customize a game to make it sense the necessary times to rumble?
Agreed, the title should mention robots.
Why not just use a controller that rumbles. Like a PS2 joypad?
Um not gross.