Description:

The first iteration of the TorqueTuner, a rotary haptic force-feedback module, was designed in 2019 by Mathias Kirkegaard, Christian Frisson, and Marcelo M. Wanderley.

The servo used to control the motor haptics, the Mechaduino, has been out of production since 2020, as discussed in Albert-Ngabo Niyonsenga’s subsequent project, Sustainable Haptic Development.

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 sustainable haptic development by reviving the first design with a custom PCB that reproduces the Mechaduino.

As part of this project, the Mechaduino circuit design was ported from EAGLE to KiCad (free, open-source PCB design software), and a new PCB layout was routed from scratch. The design files, along with a set of fabrication files and a protocol for flashing the ATSAMD21 MCU, are available 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 two other TorqueTuner implementations.

IDMIL Participants:

• Danilo Pesevic

Research Areas:

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

Funding:

• NSERC

Publications:

• Danilo Pesevic, Isaac Ng, Maxwell Gentili-Morin, Marcelo M. Wanderley, Christian Frisson (2026-07-09). 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.