How does a phone vibrate?
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There’s small uneven weight attached to an electric motor that when spun causes the phone to shake, creating the vibrations you hear and feel!
It has a tiny electric motor attached to a weight which is heavier on one side than the other. When the motor spins the weight, being intentionally off center, causes the phone to very quickly move back and forth – which is the vibration.
It’s a little counterweight on a small electric motor. Same principle as an unbalanced washing machine but tiny.
Tiny but powerful motor(s) in your phone spin with an offset weight, similar to when you put clothes in the washer and something heavy isnt balanced properly. This happens so quickly, if feels like a vibration.
There are multiple ways. Here are 2 of the more common.
1. An unbalanced motor is spun. To see how this works, take a small object with a hole on one of its ends. Like a nail clipper, or a toothbrush. Now insert a toothpick in the object’s hole, grab the toothpick and rotate it. Your hand will be pulled in different directions by the rotating toothbrush. A cellphone does the same just way faster.
2. The other kind of vibration is with 2 magnets next to each other. Take 2 magnets and a piece of cardboard. Place magnet 1 on top and magnet 2 underneath the cardboard so they can influence each other magnetically. Now grab the bottom magnet and rotate and or move it randomly. You will notice the cardboard vibrate. Inside a cell phone one of the magnets is attached to the phone body and the other is an energized coil, similar to a common speaker.
NOTE: speakers vibrate so fast you can hear them, so a speaker is just a fancy vibrator
Same reason your washing machine does: there’s a motor that spins around, and it’s not perfectly balanced. The only difference is the motor in your phone is smaller and more unbalanced on purpose.
Everyone saying it’s a motor spinning an unbalanced weight is a few years behind the curve.
Most modern phones use a linear actuator. The simplest explanation is it’s a magnet that can move back and forth on a spring in a straight line. It then has an electromagnet that can turn off and on at a harmonic frequency causing each oscillation to be a bit bigger than the one before. (Like pushing someone on a swing). Anytime the magnet changes directions it has to push back on the body of the phone which we feel as a vibration.
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They use linear actuators now, but I had a game controller with vibration and a clear case many years ago and you could see the weights spinning. I thought it was super cool lol
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