This week, luckily, was much simpler than the previous weeks. All we were tasked to do was to create some I2C input, and proof of a registered output.

I wanted to use this week to begin testing, prototyping, and theorizing for my final project. Since I’m primarily using vibration as an output based on API input, I decided to sub out the input for what I was testing last week (the flight distance sensor.)

Funnily enough, I had some mini coin vibration motors from my haptics final freshman year, so I was able to use these for testing. I also found my old Arduino kit, which was very useful! This meant extra transistors, diodes, jumper wires, and resistors for me.

At first, I tried to do this with the ESP32, but it proved to be… frustrating. I subbed out an Arduino Uno to start for the sake of time.

The first thing I tried to do was get the vibration motor to buzz on its own, and on a set interval (on, off, on, off.) I realized that my transistor was shorting itself because I had it all on the same row, (whoops), so the motor would just continuously vibrate with no interval. I fixed this by flipping all of my hardware 90 degrees.

After getting the interval code to work successfully, I then tried bringing the distance sensor back into the mix. With it, I wanted to try and get a threshold working, where the motor would turn on once the user hits a close enough distance threshold to the motor. It took a bit of research on how to make this happen, but I got that working as well.

Finally, for the sake of my final, I wanted to see if I could mimic my idea (where the vibration gets more intense the closer you are to the sensor.) This wasn’t hard necessarily, but the vibration motor I had on hand did not necessarily have the same PWM capability I was looking for. The only thing I could feasibly change was the frequency of vibration. For the sake of what I had in mind, I was able to

Now, I need to figure out what kind of small-scale motor that does both; fits within a wearable without a lot of janky hardware, and a motor that can mimic the style of vibration im going for. I want to change the vibration intensity, not the frequency of intervals.

I did a little bit of searching on Digikey to see what I could find, but I will need to speak with David to see what might be recommended.