Vibration motor too strong

Do you happen to live near one of the #fairphoneangels or one of the ‘heavens’?
There are some groups meeting regularely (e.g. in Austria and Germany: Wien, Hamburg, Freiburg, Stuttgart, Aachen, Düsseldorf, München), where you might get a chance to at least check if swapping the module does the trick for you.

I created the topic just after posting here.
While this community is indeed great, I still wouldn’t expect miracles late on a sunday :wink: .

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I also find this very annoying, and it’s one of the cons of the smartphone. It would be nice to be able to replace the module or modify the configuration. To me, it’s not only since the new case, but since the beginning compared to other smartphones way more discreet.

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I agree. But if it was an issue of technical feasibility and not warranty, there would also be the opposite approach: put a dremel or a drill to the weight and take off some material on the other side. At least that won’t create issues with sugru, silicon or whatever flying off the rotor.

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I have already thought along the same line.
You just would have to be a real precision engineer to not damage the axle or it’s bearing in the process of reshaping the weight.
And maybe taking off some weight would result in a higher rotation speed. Should be interesting to test the outcome.

Maybe someone with the necessary skills can give it a try.
There should be some broken bottom modules out there with a still working vibration motor.

Now that I think of it:
@Douwe
Do you see any chance, that broken bottom modules could be used for tinkering i.e. “recycling” vibration motors?
Judging from the pictures of the IFIXIT teardown, this motor should be not too difficult to change.
Distribution through the heavens???

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A post was merged into an existing topic: Missing Vibrator intensity setting in LineageOS

This reminded me: I do have a spare new bottom module lying around here from an earlier unsuccessful attempt at repair (turned out, it was not the bottom module’s fault). And I tend to think that the vibration motor on my phone is not quite strong enough. Sure, if on a table it rattles somewhat, but when the phone is in my front pocket I still miss messages because I fail to notice the vibration.

So just out of curiosity I swapped the bottom modules out right now to check, but I think vibration is equally strong on both bottom modules I have - at least I didn’t notice much of a difference. Now if my bottom modules vibrate less than yours and there was a way to actually establish that, I wouldn’t mind trying to swap. But how to know if it is worth trying ?

If you happen to have two equally strong modules, maybe just give it a try and exchange one of them with Max_Triff?
Worst case, you end up with the ‘same’ setup and nothing has changed besides the expenses for shipping.

Yes, it is really just a question of shipping costs, depending on the distance. If it’s not too expensive, why not?

It is very easy to remove and re-insert the vibration motor in the bottom module by pushing it in/out. It is not glued, soldered or screwed to the bottom module.

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You do need to open the bottom module, though. There are multiple metal and plastic tabs that hold the cover and base of the module together. I haven’t actually tried, so it may be quite simple in reality, but to me it looked like it would be a rather delicate operation to unclip all tabs without bending or damaging them.

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Hi there,
I noticed, that in TWRP Recovery is a possibility to change the intensity of the vibration in the options.
So there should be a way to reduce it in the OS itself right?

Cheers

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Did you try if changing the setting makes a difference? (I don’t have an FP2 as the FP1 still serves my needs, so can’t try this myself).

It makes a difference
The vibration motor makes less turns when the intensity is low.

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Does the intensity you set in TWRP perhaps stay the same once you boot the OS again, or does the OS reset its own intensity?

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Didn’t test this
I think it’s just within the TWRP Recovery

I’ve found that over time the vibration sub-module seems to suffer from wear-and-tear, making it vibrate weaker than when brand new. Perhaps not the best answer, but give it a few months and your phone’ll be fine…

For the hard-core tweakers, it should be controllable by tweaking the PWM controller. Parameters seem to be documented in the Fairphone kernel and controlled in the device tree part of the kernel (or here or here). That is… assuming this device tree node is the right one for the Fairphone and not a generic node for a different device. I suspect you want to tweak the imagis,pwm-div and imagis,pwm-freq parameters. If you’re game you can roll your own device tree and boot the Linux kernel with that instead of the standard Fairphone device tree (which will presumably take a bit of adb or fastboot toying). Perhaps @z3ntu has already taken a look at this?

Edit: he has! :smiley:

The driver for the vibration motor found in the Fairphone 2 is called “drv2603”. The sources you linked are in the kernel source but have nothing to do with the device tree being used by the phone, but are from the Qualcomm sources.

I don’t think that the motor in the FP2 is connected to a PWM pin but only to an on/off pin. In the kernel source there is a definition for DRV2603_VIBRATOR_PWM but it only really gets used in the call gpio_direction_input(DRV2603_VIBRATOR_PWM); which sets the gpio to input which doesn’t really make sense (as pwm is output).

So vibration strength is mostly the duration the motor is active (e.g. 10ms is very light and 100ms is pretty strong) and not configurable software-wise as far as I know.

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:thinking:…where is this message/proposal now someone just posted for new replacement motors of the FP2 supplier???..

Anyway technical specs are valuable as these motors are more general as most people think. According to this or this it’s important to know the voltage, rpm, and of course the measurements. Within these specs there are a lot of variations possible as replacement. Anyway someone is needed capable of soldering to replace the part.

It was clearly spam, so it’s gone.