One bored Redditor decided to make their mouse provide realistic recoil whenever they use it to play a first-person shooter game.

Most of us are fairly content to just play games while we’re waiting for the coronavirus lockdown to end, but some of us have this insatiable drive to create. Those players are usually the ones making ludicrously elaborate islands in Animal Crossing, but a few of those players are electrical engineers. They’re a wacky bunch.

For example, this electrical engineer rigged their mouse up with half a dozen solenoids and then wrote some python code to simulate the recoil you’d experience when firing a machine gun.

Teenenggr explains how the whole system works on their personal project website. Step one is to rig your favorite gaming mouse with a bunch of electric vibration motors (also known as solenoids) to make the mouse vibrate rhythmically. Next, write some Python code that reads “mouse events” and sends that information to Arduino, an open-source platform that facilitates communication between PCs and electronic gizmos.

Arduino then sends the info received from the PC to the mouse and its arsenal of solenoids. Then whenever you pull the trigger, the mouse recoils with each bullet.

If you want to recreate Teenenggr’s setup in your own home, they’ve made all the code and schematics available online. You’ll of course need to have some technical knowhow to get it all set up, and you’ll need some hardware that you should be able to order online easily enough.

As several Redditors noted in the comments, this isn’t even the first time someone has tried to get some force feedback on a mouse. Logitech tried this way back when with the iFeel mouse. Essentially a mouse loaded with the same motors as found in a modern console controller, the iFeel would vibrate whenever the player performed certain actions in-game. It screwed up your aim, and few games actually supported it, so the iFeel was discontinued and never replaced.

And yet, people still want rumble controllers on consoles. Funny, that.

Source: Teenenggr.com, Reddit