 Hi, an API brought to you by DigiKey and Adafruit. Thank you, DigiKey. This week it is from Vibronics. We never used, we never featured Vibronics on an API. It's a cool logo. They do have a cool logo. This is a company they make vibrating motors, ERMs or LRAs. And you're like, what are those? We're going to tell you all about this. So this is the featured product. This is a rectangular LRA. But they have the whole INFPIs because they have a whole series of LRAs available at DigiKey. And I've never really known the difference between LRAs and ERMs with their four. The specific part number we're covering is the VLV152564. Those numbers are like, you know, probably just the sizing of the board. You see it's like 6.4 millimeters. That's 64. And then 25 is 25 millimeters by 15 millimeters. So 15 by 25 by 6.4 millimeters. It's actually, batteries are also labeled the same way. So these are LRAs. They're linear, resonant actuators. That's what it stands for. And these are vibrating motors that are enclosed into like a little rectangular case, like we put into your product and design to add tactile feedback. It looks like it also can be used as a bone conduction transducer if desired. But what it's really good for is adding little clicks and tacks and ticks to your product for haptic feedback. This particular one is, you know, just having some stats here. The resonant frequency, you know, when you use your driver, just make sure you can drive an 8 ohm impedance. So it's quite low. You'll need quite a bit of current. And the resonant frequency is about 80 hertz. So set up your driving frequency to set the AC voltage at about 80 hertz, and that will get you the best reaction. Okay. So what is haptic feedback? So it's actually kind of researching what is haptics, and when was it used? So this is like a very early haptics patent that I found off of, you know, linked off of Wikipedia. And basically, it was often used for when you have an electronic interface to something that's mechanical. It used to be mechanical, and you want to give feedback to the user to let them know when they've hit a limit, or there's something that would give them negative feedback towards their position movement. What it's often used for was aviation. So historically, you know, if you look at old videos of airplanes, you'd have a yoke, right? This is the control interface for the plane, and the yoke would be mechanically connected to, I think they're called air liens, or flaps, I think is what we call them, and we don't know what we're talking about. The flaps on the wings, and the flaps on the tail, and the rudder to help steer which way you want the plane to go. This is what, you know, an old plane that the rudder cables look like, and those would literally be like strung from the flaps to the cockpit, and then you'd control the yoke. And what was really nice about this is that you could feel the vibrations and movement of the air through those cables. It was both directions, like as you pulled and pushed and twisted the yoke, you could feel how the cables and the rudder would fight against you. That was your forced feedback, so you kind of knew what your airspeed was. You know, turbulence obviously shakes the whole thing, but you get a sense of how your plane is moving and how it's reacting to the air, which can help you become a better pilot and avoid issues like accidentally crashing to the ground. However, the problem with having direct connections to the rudder cables is that you need to be very strong, like if you have a lot of force in the air fighting against you, you have to really like push against the yoke or pull it or twist it in order to fight the air that's, you know, on the other side of the rudder that's pushing against you. You have to be very strong, and like if you're in trouble, like if you're in a storm, you might be running out of strength, and then you could get in trouble because you can't fight against that air pressure anymore. So to simplify and also allow things like autopilot, we have the creation of fly by wire. This is like an early, this is actually from like NASA, this photo, it's kind of cool. You can tell that they see. I think digital had to use the check. Check phone. Yeah, this is the phone I used for hacking. Actually, you worked with Digital Equipment Corporation where there's just digital. It was like just the check for you. But this is the NASA fly by wire. Also, again, you know, as you're getting to more and more complicated airplanes, people like one yoke in the buns was not enough. You had to have everything automated, as people actually had to shout of being able to control it. But, you know, in addition, it's from Ready Player One. I thought this was from the Apple keynote from like yesterday. Oh, sorry. It's only $3,500. So in addition to, you know, okay, so, you know, aeronautics also, automobiles are also drive by wire. And so you'll have forced feedback in those. But a second use case is for entertainment. So you know, this is this famous haptic suit from the Ready Player One movie and book. And it's covered all over with haptic feedback interfaces, maybe LRIs from Vibronics. So that when you, you know, fight or run or chase or, you know, whatever, play games in the metaverse, you would feel it on your body. And so it gives you a strong connection to this virtual world you're in. So, you know, that's, of course, movie recreation. You know, the first commercial haptics vest was this thing called like the Aura Interactor, which I thought was neat. It was kind of like a wearable subwoofer. And you can see, it's like feel punches, explosion kicks, uppercuts, slam-dugs, crashes and more. So it was for gaming. Gaming, you know, often has new technology. Like there was these VR haptics suits, but they were very, very expensive. But gaming is actually kind of where this haptic technology... Fun side story. If you go through really deep rabbit hole, I made a version of Operation on the Pocket PC that would send sound to a vest I was wearing. So if you messed up taking me apart in operation, I would get, you know, jolted in the vest. This was 20 years ago. This is a long time ago. This was like 1995 and then 97. Also, gaming included, since it's like a screenshot from, for people who remember from the Nintendo 64, they introduced the rumble pack, which would have forced feedback on the controller when you played Nintendo games. And this is an, I fix a tear down of the DualShock. And the DualShock is another controller. So I'm kind of making my way through the history of tactile feedback and what it was really commonly used for. And you can see on the bottom there to the bottom left in the like the palm holding section of the controller. There are these two circular motors and they have this kind of half disc cut and attached onto the motor. The motor's around and then the half disc is kind of half moon shaped. And these are called ERMs. So eccentric rotating motors. And here's an eccentric rotating motor from Vibranics. They can be any size. You take any DC motor and you put an eccentric weight on it. It's not symmetric. And so as it rotates and vibrates and that gives you that force feedback. And eccentric rotating motors are very popular for use with, say, your phone will vibrate when you call. They're very good for like big vibrations. So like that interactor vest or your rumble pack. It is a rumble feeling. What they're not really good for is click feelings. So a lot of people these days, you probably have a mobile phone and you maybe use the on-screen keyboard. And you may notice that as you're typing on the on-screen keyboard, you get this tactile feedback, this click tech sound. And feeling into your fingers and it helps make the clear glass surface feel more like, okay, I'm actually pressing a button. You feel you're not, of course, technically pressing a button. I remember the Kindle was also an early use of tactile feedback when you clicked the next page that the Kindle would kind of vibrate a little bit to let you know that you've switched the page. So a good way, you know, as more surfaces are becoming capacitive touch, clear glass, you want to have some tactile feedback, you'll want to use something like an ERM. Sorry, an LRA. ERMs are good for vibrations. LRAs are great are better for tactiles because they're faster. You're not, you know, for the motor, if you're spinning up the motor to move this eccentric weight, you have to kind of get the motor going and you have to slowly ramp it up. And they can be fairly fast, but they're not going to be as fast as an LRA. And here's an LRA cross section from Vibronics. You can see it's a lot more complicated to build, so they're going to be a little bit more expensive. But inside, there's a spring and there's the weight and there's a magnet. And then when you put the AC voltage across it, and that's another thing, you need to use an AC voltage not a DC voltage, the magnet will vibrate up and down, so the magnet will vibrate over down, making the weight vibrate up and down, the spring will push back on it. And you've got this very quick tactile feeling that, as you remember from the data sheet, can activate within 80 Hertz. And I'll show the video because it's kind of cool. There's an X-ray on the Digi-Key website from Vibronics showing this product and you can see inside the spring and then the weight and the magnet, the springs are also used for passing the current through and that's what causes the LRA to vibrate. So Vibronics shows a bunch of products it's used for. So you can see this is like the Samsung phones. They also had it in like one of the Nexus tablets with a coincidence, Nexus is everywhere. Usually you don't solder to the tabs or there are some solder tabuans, it looks like it's common to have spring contacts and that lets the motor vibrate from within like the cavity in your product and it gives the case, it makes the case kind of a larger resonant cavity for the vibration of the LRA. You will need something to drive it. Again, you can't use it with DC voltages like you can with the ARMs. ARMs are much simpler. LRAs you need AC voltage. There's a couple that are recommended. The one that I've used is the TI DRV 2605 which is in stock at Digi-Key. It's very easy to use and it has iSquared C input and then we have a breakout as well. You can connect your LRA or ERM on the output and particularly neat about the DRV 2605. You do pay a little bit more but it has this cool collection of waveforms that are built in and their license waveforms that you get a free license for when you purchase the chip. So the motions like the clicking and the bumping and the transitioning. So it's like, you know, click, click, all that stuff with different strengths already pre-programmed into the DRV 2605. So it's really, really easy. I mean, yes, you can DIY this yourself with an H-bridge and a little bit of work but instead you can just use the DRV 2605 and get started very quickly and it will work with any of the Vibronix LRAs. Available on Digi-Key. They're in stock and there's a bunch of different ones. This is just the one that we, you know, this is the featured one but check out, they have like a huge range of different sizes and shapes. There's round ones or square ones or rectangular ones. And then we've got a cool video. Yeah, this is what you want to show. Which maybe you can hide us. It shows an x-ray as they inspect the vibration. You can see how quickly it's activates. I mean it's like basically instantaneous as you can get sharp clicking effects that are harder to get with an ERM. Okay. This is this week's INFEI.