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A project log for WEFT electrovibration demo board

This board is for prototyping electrotactile interactions - use an electronic signal to dynamically change the texture of a surface.

akaAKA 11/15/2015 at 06:400 Comments

The WEFT board is working OK, but there are a couple component-selection factors to optimize.

More importantly, I'm hoping that making this project public will help move it into the realm of the really-useful - something that others might want to (and the be able to!) make for themselves.

To really make the electrovibration sensation reliable/repeatable across different people and environments, I need to figure out how to implement current-sensing feedback on the high-voltage side. This involves two tasks that I have failed at thus far: measuring the (tiny) current on the signal side, and then effectively modulating the boost converter circuit to account for the measured current.

At present, I suspect I'm operating with a pretty poor boost converter circuit - I can't get the voltage much higher than it is (which is still around 180v tops, a little more than half the voltage used by the Disney researchers), so Im' probably going to scrap the current transformer-based circuit and substitute in a 555-based boost circuit, closer to the Revel paper's implementation.

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