Force feedback was once exclusive to arcade machines for many years, but that changed forever with the appearance of several home consoles and their special gamepads. However, the effect is not very common in computers... unless we follow the DIY route. The user Teenenggr decided to take force feedback to the extreme, connecting half a dozen solenoids to an Arduino that activates them when it detects mouse activity... gunshots, to be more precise.
The keyboard/mouse combo may enable great advantages when playing (especially when connected to a console), but it has ignored some secondary aspects, and one of them is force feedback. That feature dates back to 1976 with the debut of Moto-Cross, and consoles were quick to adopt it, while keyboards and mice didn't make much effort to reproduce it. From a certain point of view, it makes sense: do we really want an effect that could harm our aim?
Force feedback on your mouse
However, user Teenenggr doesn't care: he wants to feel the shots beyond the sound and fire on screen. With that in mind, he took half a dozen JF-Z05 solenoids (the 12V version costs five dollars online), connected them to an Arduino Uno and two power sources (12V and 5V). Then he wrote a Python application that records mouse events (i.e., pressing the button) and sends a signal to the Arduino (via USB) to activate the solenoids. The result is impressive even in 41 seconds of video. The solenoids turn the mouse into a machine gun.
The best part is that the project has ample room for modification. Nothing stops us from creating a 3D-printed support and installing the solenoids more cleanly, or using smaller models. All the necessary code is available on GitHub, so if you can conjure up some solenoids this weekend and have experience with Python and Arduino, why not? I imagine it would be fabulous in Doom Eternal or Borderlands 3...
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