Description:

The first iteration of the TorqueTuner, a rotary haptic force feedback module, was designed in 2019 by Mathias Kirkegaard and Christian Frisson. As discussed in Albert-Ngabo Niyonsenga’s project, Sustainable Haptic Development, the servo used to control the motor haptics, the Mechaduino, has been out of production since 2020. Since then, the TorqueTuner has been ported to the Moteus platform (2022) and more recently to the MaTouch SmartKnob (2026, SHIVERS).

This project takes a different approach to addressing sustainable haptic development by reviving the first design through a custom PCB reproducing the Mechaduino.

As a part of this project, the Mechaduino circuit design was ported from EAGLE to KiCad (a free, open-source PCB design software) and new PCB layout was routed from scratch. The design files, as well as a set of fabrication files and a protocol for flashing the ATSAMD21 MCU is provided in the project repository.

This project is still in development, though the current design (v1.2) is stable and was demonstrated at Eurohaptics 2026 alongside the other two TorqueTuners.

IDMIL Participants:

• Danilo Pesevic

Research Areas:

• Embedded Systems
• Haptics: Tactile and Force-Feedback
• Hardware Development

Funding:

• NSERC

Publications:

• Pesevic, D., Ng, I., Gentili-Morin, M., Wanderley, M. M., Frisson, C. (2026). Experiencing different 1 Degree-of-Freedom rotary actuators across iterations of TorqueTuners in musical applications. In Proceedings of the 2026 EuroHaptics Conference (EuroHaptics '26) (pp. 3). Siena, Italy.