In January 2025 I was leading a tour of the famous Shenzhen Electronics market (HQB) last January with some Korean professors. One of them was into haptics, so we went looking for some second hand Apple Taptic modules. We found an iPhone 11 (P/N: 610-00316) module for ￥3.00/ea in the huge communication building:
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He generously bought 10 of them for me so I volunteered to make a breakout board/controller board to help test the module out. Of course, it has a very tiny mezzanine connector on it. There wasn't much info online about the connector, but I did find something close: <insert LCSC link>. Unfortunately it was the wrong size. I did try removing the modules connector and soldering the other side of the LCSC connector to the Taptic module, but being made of flex PCB (plastic) material, it didn't like too much heat and after a few attempts at getting the incorrectly sized connector into place it shriveled up. Luckily I managed to acquire the correct Apple mezzanine connector from HQB market place. While the side pins are the same as my previous LCSC connector, the Apple connector was a bit longer, so it was tricky to get to sit in the correct middle location as surface tension wanted the connector to sit more at one end. But I did eventually get 5 boards assembled. The first version of the haptic breakout board used the LCSC connector. The next version uses the Apple connector so it should be much easier to solder into place.
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Oh, and if anyone else is following along at home I found that the Taptic module motor is driven by the end pins so you can just remove the modules FPC mezzanine connector and solder wires directly to the FPC and drive the linear motor that way. There seems to be some end sensors at the ends of the linear motor, as my multimeter detects three other pins being used on on the connector. There might be more, but I won't know that till next week when the next PCB arrives with the correct (fingers crossed) mezzanine footprint. Here I am debugging my Moun River C program:
- Debugging-Haptic-Board.jpg (184.74 KiB) Viewed 4143 times
As I am on a bit of a CH32V003 surge, I placed one of the board and had it talk via i2C to a DRV2605 haptic driver IC. The IC has 123 different haptic effects stored inside. I eventually figured out how to have the driver IC play each one on the Taptic module. This is kind of cool to feel the difference between each one. Some are very subtle.
While I added a 3.5mm SMT audio connector to the next version of the board, it might be best to add a cheap mono audio amplifier as well, so watch this space, there might be another board version coming?
This has been a fun Shenzhen project eg: something that just pops up and can be quickly initiated and acted on. I think I had the first board designed up and in production by the end of the day after receiving the Taptic modules. Three days later I had a working board assembled and a day of playing with code to get it vibrating.
GitLab Project Repo