How to interpret gamepad-rumblers ?

Question

I'm experimenting with the rumblers on my gamepad and when I 'read' the gamepad (with JInput),
it finds 5 rumblers.

So I expected the gamepad to have two rumblers on each side and one in the middle.
However, that seems not to be true, because :

The rumbling always comes from one side, and;

If I let 3 or 5 rumblers rumble simultaneously, then the rumble is only a little bit stronger
than just one rumbler rumbling, not the expected 3 or 5 times stronger.

So I don't know what to think of this. Can someone explain how to interpret these
five rumblers (from a developer-perspective) ?

Answer 1

Assuming you actually are activating all five rumblers, the explanation for not experiencing a five time increase seems to be that the first rumbler contributes significantly more to the rumbling of the pad than the remaining. This is to be expected unless the rumblers are positioned at completely unrelated (i.e. disjoint) positions inside the gamepad.

As for the positioning, as you (indirectly) say they, all seem to be positioned in one side of the game pad. Opening the game pad or acquiring a schematic will tell you where they are.