Turn your office chair into a simple motion simulator!

A tutorial on how to create a simple motion simulator! Your chair will vibrate according to the content of the movie/game/music you are listening to! It's very easy and cheap! Have fun doing it!

***Disclaimer*** The following is for informational purposes only, I take no responsibility for what you do with this knowledge.

Step 1 What You Need

Sorry it is my first tutorial so it could be that it is not as good as others but i try it.. :) and I am Italian so my English also isn't the best!

I have less pictures of this project because i built it out of a active subwoofer and so it is a bit different. but its very easy and watching the final clip you will understand everything.

IMPORTANT: Before you search for the materials read through the whole tutorial else you will have problems to fit the parts together!

What you need is:

1) a old speaker from 40W upwards

2) a Hi-Fi with "line in" or a amplifier.

3) a 100 to 200g weight, if possible flat and round. (i made mine melting some lead into a steel cup.)

4) some wires

5) screws

6) a office chair to use

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Tools:

1) sharp cutter,

2) soldering iron

3) screwdriver

4) glue suitable for the material of weight you use

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I used this active subwoofer. Active means that it has a amplifier inside and does not need an additional one. The disadvantage of mine is that it uses a signal coming from the player to switch on and off so I had to bridge the circuit.

Comments

[singarich]

What do you mean by 'garden pipe'? Is is a piece of hose or some hard piping? How do you find one that fits inside the cylinder perfectly?

[Hacker95XP]

Ahahah che cagata!!Mi aspettavo qualcosa di più :-D

[tamakid]

this is really awesome! i stuck 2 speakers to the bottom of my chair, and made it all nice and silent.. but it shakes the crap out of my chair! its so cool! it really adds another dimension to the music/sound your hearing

[sharkyenergy]

thanks! would be cool to see some pics!

[brendanvista]

Hey Sharky! So I have made a few of these chairs and even mounted some on a couch. But usually I game with headphones and I have a quick tip for those who also do. Go into your windows audio control panel and choose your speaker setup. Choose 5.1 channel and then on the next screen, uncheck the rear speakers and center. Then plug the headphones into the front speaker channel and the sub into the sub channel. You will get the 5 channels dowmixed into the headphones and then the rumble in the sub.

[sharkyenergy]

nice to see that you like it.. :) maybe mail me some pictures of oyurs! sharkyenergy at hotmail o com... o is a dot ofcourse.. :D and thanks for the tip! didnt think of that!

[bowmaster]

Dude!! This amazing! If you had a large monitor, surround sound headphones, a gaming vest, and this you would be in the game!

[bowmaster]

Hehe, I just found a 2,000W subwoofer for $85. I can;t wait to mount it on a chair.

[darkclaw42]

 Whoah, what sub is it?

[bowmaster]

It's just the plain subwoffer. No case, controls, or wiring. I'll try to find it again.

[sharkyenergy]

hahah nice.. :D hope to see some pictures when youre done.. :D

[bowmaster]

Lol, I know. It's 50 times what he recommends to use! It's an 18 inch subwoofer, I might have to get a four legged chair so there's room on the bottom.

[sharkyenergy]

lol.. :D why not sit directly into the woofer? :D by the way did you check alsy my other tutorials? i have one that simualtes speed that is pretty cool combined with this one...

[bowmaster]

Yeah, I saw the speed simulator one, it's pretty cool.

[brendanvista]

Just wanted to say, the vertical thing is absolutely critical.

[sharkyenergy]

totally agree! you could get your house on fire if not vertical.. the speaker can only stay horizontal if the membran is not broken.

[brendanvista]

I have the type 3 speaker and have removed the top membrane, but the lower one, ie. the lower yellow one in your picture is still there. My chair plays music. Should I remove the lower one?

[sharkyenergy]

hi! you can not remove teh lower one because it is used to hold the coild inplace. but you can cut out a peace of ti like i did in the picture, but you have to be careful that the coil is still stable. how many watt does your speaker have? what weight did you put on it? is the chair working as expected? a little bit of sound will allways come from your chair, but not much, you can easily overcme that with your game sound. hope this helps.. :)

[brendanvista]

Hey thanks. The chair is working very well. I used a flat round rock as the weight. (Hey, it works great). The speaker is a 120 watt subwoofer speaker. And of course, I never notice the sound coming out from the chair when I have my sound system on, but I also like to play with just headphones and that is when I really notice it, lol. Anyway, that is what I wanted to know, if it was OK to take a bit of the lower membrane out. BTW, you rock dude. And my chair is amazing!

[sharkyenergy]

hehe, thank you very much.. nice to see that someboddy is actually building something iv'e put on here.. :) hope you enjoy it and maybe check out my other tutorials! ;) cu igor

[tudgeanator]

Favorited! Can you think of any way i could mount these on the back of a chair? Cheers.

[sharkyenergy]

huh depends on the chair.. can you post a picture?

[tudgeanator]

Ummmm, no not at the moment- at school in a dt lesson. It's a sortof go cart chair you know? Black, made of plastic.

[vinnygx3pimp]

They sell something of this sort. it is called an audio transducer and all it is is a fist sized motor with a semicircle weight on the end and it vibrates when sound from a computer send a signal to turn it on. they are meant to be mounted under chairs

[theryan]

they sell professional versions of these for drum thrones and bass risers. theyre called buttkickers and are pretty expensive. I played a gig on a kit with one on the throne one time and it was fun but my back hurt like hell. nice instructable. karma to you!

[a grain of alt.]

Looks like someone is playing a cracked version of Far Cry... naughty-naughty. : P

[sharkyenergy]

you look wrong.. :D farcry is freeware.. you can download it on ubisofts page.. :)

[a grain of alt.]

Oh, yeah! I completely forgot that they had done that with a bunch of their games... greatest apologies, mate. FYI- if you're trying to get rid of the black textures bug, try the newest patch and updating your video card drivers.

[sharkyenergy]

thanks for the advice, i already got rid of it. it is a incompatibility of a old iz3D driver version with a unpatched farcry version.. everything fixed now. but thank you anyway.. :)

[matseng]

"Turn your office chair into a vibrating chair" would be a better title for this instructable. I don't seen any motion here. But it's a nice euphemism to use when someone finds a girls hidden vibrator in her room. "No mother, it's not a vibrator. It's a motion simulator " :-)

[sharkyenergy]

heheheh thats good.. :D well i selected motion simulator because when youre using it you feel like in a motion simualtor at all.. due to the fact that it is using the audio channel and frequencies, the vibration is teh exact you would have from that specific gun/engline. thats why i devided to write motion simulator.

[LasVegas]

Now all you need is a solenoid triggered by any sharp "crack" to hit you in the back. OUCH! Great Instructable!

[noahw]

(removed by author or community request)

[sharkyenergy]

corrected and now it is online.. thanks for your help

[noahw]

No problem. I made some other small grammatical changes and fixed your video embeds as well.

[sharkyenergy]

thank you... :) whad did i make wrong with the video? don't want to make it in future.. :)