New Life Games LLC
Other Hobbies and Interests that our NLG members enjoy => Other Hobbies and Interests => Topic started by: jay on June 14, 2016, 12:39:02 AM
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I am looking for some ideas for my home theater seating.
My theater is a 7.1 audio system (Center, Left, Right, Lside, Rside, Rear-Left, Rear-Right and a 14" subwoofer).
I have two rows of pleather home theater seats. Each row consists of 3 chairs.
I have hooked up BASS shaker Pros to the base of each of the chairs and two smaller bass shakers inside the two common arms.
I use a separate amplifier to output only bass to the chairs. This way I can control the shaking separate from the audio in the room.
It works really well and I feel it enhances the couch potato experience.
I was recently at the theater to see the new Xmen movie and got to sit in these Dbox seats. They move up/down left/right in time with the movie.
I thought it was pretty cool.
Reading more about Dbox - apparently these seats are digitally controlled and the "d-track" that controls the seats is distributed to the theater along with the movie and will likely never be released to the home theater people (even if they could possibly afford them). Digressing a bit - due to the short in-theater runs fewer people go to the cinema and wait for the movies to come out on dvd or steaming media so the theaters are trying to draw more people in with better amenities like reserved seating, dbox, food service etc.
Anyways this got me thinking about making my seats move. Again using bass as my source I was thinking of hooking up linear actuators.
These are electronic extenders that push out when 12v is applied and retract when -12v is applied.
I was thinking of using a relay to apply -12v, when bass hits the relay applies +12v and extends - bass stops or stops intermittently the -12v retracts.
There is automatic limit switches so with -12v applied they will retract then cut off power when they are fully retracted and the same when fully extended.
Here is a link to one of these units......
http://www.aliexpress.com/item/Best-1-inch-25mm-stroke-Electric-linear-actuator-dc-motor-DC-12V-5-10-25mm-s/32522824933.html?spm=2114.13010308.0.45.QOEzkT (http://www.aliexpress.com/item/Best-1-inch-25mm-stroke-Electric-linear-actuator-dc-motor-DC-12V-5-10-25mm-s/32522824933.html?spm=2114.13010308.0.45.QOEzkT)
Looking into this deeper the problems that I see with these units is the duty cycle and load.
The duty cycle on the best ones are about 20% meaning that if you run them for an hour you would not want to use them for more than 12min. If you are talking about the bass track - you are probably hitting 40-60% bass in an action flick at a minimum. Theoretically these would go into thermal overload about 20min into the movie or just burn out.
The second issue is load - if you have a heavy person on one end of the sofa the actuator that side will go up slower than the far end with the 5lb dog/rat.
This drives you into using fancy versions of the actuators with Hale sensors so that controllers can sync the speed. These types of actuators jump to the $300 range and the controllers to sync multiple actuators can run you $1000. Quite a bit more than I spent on the theater seats.
So given that these devices are not the right tool for the job - what thoughts does the NLG community have to give that 4d motion.
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Sounds like an interesting project. Can't really help much with actuator part, but my concern would be that just syncing it to the bass might not provide the desired experience. Is every "bass shaker" moment just going to tilt/move the seat back? Is that what you want for something like a thunder boom?
Anyway, I do have one thought on the actuators, and that is to use a PWM controller. If you could somehow use the output level of the bass to feed the PWM controller, you would not only have a variable speed based on intensity, but also help a lot with your duty cycle issue.
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I just use a car airbag in the sofa cushion.
Not on my side naturally, but the wife's... :24:
:bomb: :wife: :wife: