What are some of the problems involved with tactile transducer arrays?
• Cancellation. Imagine mounting 12 tactile transducers in a row on a 7 foot long piece of wood. The idea is to get all of the transducers to work together and transfer their vibrational energy to you. Unfortunately what the transducers are also doing is exciting vibrational modes along the piece of wood, some constructively and some destructively. Think of the piece of wood as a sine wave on a stretched piece of string and you get the idea, Actually the middle point of the wood is more like a fixed endpoint but it is much more complicated than that. • Getting the best impedance load so as to maximize the amplifier wattage is a little tricky with large numbers of transducers. Remember the series summing and the parallel dividing rules. Factors of 2 are nice such as 4,8,16,32,64 and so are nice multiples like 3×5, 3×3, 4×7, and so on. Your chosen ohm-age can also be used to limit amplifier over powering that will result in transducer bottoming out. • With that many transducers wired up
