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After seeing a few simmers yammering on about how much immersion a bassshaker/butt kicker setup adds to the experience I recently set this simple rig up and holy moly it adds a greater deal of immersion than I had initially thought.
It complements headphones really well without annoying the neighbors unless there are people living below you.
I have tried it with music, movies, and seated games.
I am surprised that it is decent for music as well but admittedly there are far better options for music.
Haptic Feedback Hardware:
- Buttkicker advance BK4-4
- Dayton SA1000 amplifier (Mono)
- Good ol’ Ikea Markus
- 3D printed Brackets and some M6 bolts and nuts(use M6 Lock nuts or blue loctite to prevent the nut slipping due to vibration.)
- Currently using ANC headphones with my 8kx (Sony WH1000-XM2), I can fit them on my head even with the SMAS assembled to filter out any noises from the buttkicker transducers vibrating, I can also use the full frequency range of the transducers including their audible range as I can feel some vibration in that range as well and it is not particularly loud so can be easily filtered out with ANC.
The SMAS is alright but I am not a fan of open ear headphones due to the nature of my setup. I will either have to make concessions for the DMAS, or modify the DMAS itself to make it closed with sufficient passive isolation without butchering is FR (good luck with that).
Frankly I will likely stick with external ANC headphones, we’ll see.
PC
- GPU: 1080TI (aching for an upgrade)
- CPU: 3900X
- OS: 2 options
- W10 on bare metal
- Host running arch linux, VM with W10 as guest and a USB controller+1080TI passed through (works with pimax but there is a slight CPU performance hit)
Gaming on a VM sounds like a convoluted setup but it has its perks, I don’t have to deal with windows updates and can use my operating system of choice as my daily driver. I hope pitool will support Linux in the future once the project matures.
My haptic feedback setup is pretty overkill for an office chair and I am certain there are far better options for the price.
I started with a single buttikicker advance transducer jury rigged to my chair with a thin sheet of laminated wood sideways then bought a second one and aligned them both upright as illustrated.
To mount the buttkickers I designed a quick and dirty bracket using ABS due to its higher temperature resistance compared to PLA, my only concern is the bracket failing catastrophically due to fatigue since I just winged the design without doing any analysis. gave it around 20mm thickness and a nice big chunky round fillet at the angle and called it a day (printing took around 32 hours total 
).
The reason I added 2 transducers was mainly due to a single transducer overheating and shutting off when using engine RPM effects at high gain over an extended period of time which ruined my immersion.
I didn’t want to lower the gain on subsonic frequencies or meddle with an active cooling solution so I bought a second one in the hopes that I could run both sustained with passive cooling at lower gain for the same effect.
I am yet to test this setup extensively as I have to pack up and relocate soon 
Tempted to get a haptic vest now for roomscale.
I wonder how good a motion rig would be for flight sims, for now I am content with this setup the only thing I want to add are some small transducers to my pedals without resorting to building a dedicated frame. Since hands and feet give a better sensation.
That would be an interesting project, for the stick and hotas I would need a simple frame that is easy to remove so I can use the chair for other tasks. As for the pedals they will need a separate cheaper transducer, or a removable frame so I can reuse the transducer I have at hand.
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I didn’t want to spend money on sim rig as I didn’t play sims at all but wanted dirt rally 2.0 & dcs, so just used my 2020 aluminum profile I had for CNC which I had not time to build for last 3 years XD, I have barbell stand so didn’t want to loss a lot of space & use it for sim rig & for exercises lol, just put some pillow for my back (stand has good different fixed angles) & it works good enough.
I have i7 7700k & 1080ti Gygabit, bought some water cooling accessories from aliexpress for 100$ & hoses in local store & built water cooling system. Also 2 fans costed about additional 150$
Though I usually play standing some esport games like tennis & echo
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