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Optical Mouse Used As Cheap Motion Sensor
drphil writes " Dr. Tuck Wah Ng, a member of the Faculty of Engineering at the National University of Singapore uses an optical mouse as a cheap non-contact motion sensor in his research. If a resolution of a little less than 60 microns is sufficient, you really can't beat the price. Dr. Ng has studied the viscoelastic deformation of plastics using a hacked optical mouse - published in J. Chem. Ed. vol 81, p 1628, 2004. You'd need to be a subscriber of the journal to see anything but the abstract, but any university science/chemistry library would have a copy of this issue of the Journal of Chemical Education. (Viscoelastic deformation, in plain English, is the degree to which a plastic stretches when you pull on it)"
Coralized link here.
Well, I can't access the page currently but if it is what I think it is this has already been done. A high school student I knew built a optical mouse motion sensor as a project. It tracked the floor, and could be used as a human-interface controller for a robot or as the robot's position tracking mechanism.
He interfaced it to a microcontroller as well, which was the real difficult part. PS2 to a serial port, then the software to interpret it. Unfortunately the thing was handicapped by the 8 bit memory, but it was still pretty darn cool.
This was part of Andrew's Leap, a program sponsored by CMU and taught by professors to a select few high school students. Hopefully what this doctor has done is a bit more complicated.
Footprints project overview
"God fights on the side with the best artillery." - Napoleon, Marshal of France - speaking truth to power
but "motion" cannot be described in "microns." I think you mean "cheap displacement sensor".
And viscoelasticity is not necessarily a plastic-related thing. Some metals and composites may strain in a viscoelastic manner. Biological tissue is also generally deemed viscoelastic. Basically, it means: the amount of stress in the material is proportional to the rate at which it is displaced (or strained, in more correct terms).
IWARS.
People, in general, disappoint me. Politicians even more so.
60 microns is too low a resolution for that purpose.
The results are public, just not the copyrighted article. Since tax dollars do not go to the journals, they charge for subscriptions -- print or electronic.
That said, most scientists I know are frustrated by this as well, and do what they can to allow freer access to their work. So, if you want access to almost any scientific article, try the following (in order):
1) Go to the author's web page. Most journals allow authors to put copies of their papers online, and many scientists take advantage of this.
2) Go to a nearby university library. If they don't subscribe to the journal in question, ask a librarian, it may be possible to get it from another university.
3) Go to arxiv.org (formerly xxx.lanl.gov). Many articles are published there as preprints, but may or may not be the final published version.
4) Finally, email one of the authors. In all liklihood, they will be happy to send you a PDF of their article if it is not available via another mechanism.
The restrictions on the dissemination of scientific literature do not stop anyone with even a tiny bit of motivation. Also, a few journals require subscriptions, but allow google to index the full text, which means the whole article may be in google's cache.
That experiment must be from the research group that discovered that: Fruit flies have conscious experiences
Vintage computer adverts: http://www.vintageadbrowser.com/computers-and-software-ads
Old style mice (with mouse balls and encoder wheels) can also be used in scientific experiments. A bit of hacking can get the sensor and encoder wheel mounted to a shaft or to watch the slots of a homemade encoder disk (a laser printer and transparency material makes a good disk). Any basic software that can monitor mouse movement can be used to count revolutions of the wheel (just turn off mouse acceleration to get absolute mouse movement in encoder ticks). One old PC can measure 2 axes of motion for animal activity studies, windspeed & direction, robotics, etc.
Two wrongs don't make a right, but three lefts do.
It was "Scientific American Frontiers" on PBS.
Alan Alda is the host on that...
HTH.
BMO
It's a pretty common surname used here in Singapore and in its original form it's a word in one of the Chinese dialects. It's actual pronounciation is something like "urn", replacing the 'n' with an 'ng' where the tongue remains stationary instead of moving up to touch the ceiling of your mouth.
Searching Google Scolar for "optical mouse motion sensor Ng" provides some useful information. The PDFs are slashdotted like others have mentioned, but the "View as Html" pages are the google cache. The graphs are worthless, but the text is all there.