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)"

Comments

Slightly pedantic, but..

[oexeo]

Optical Mouse Used As Cheap Motion Sensor

Isn't this what mice do already?

Subscription Only Science = evil

[nurb432]

Just another way to restrict the flow of publicly funded research.

Schools get tax dollars, therefore the results of any research should be freely available to the public, unless its some sort of classified governmental stuff...

Restricting knowledge only serves to retard growth, and keep the 'special ones' in power.

Re:Subscription Only Science = evil

[Anonymous Coward]

Uh... dude, this was at the UNIVERSITY OF SINGAPORE.

So what Tax Dollars are you talking about?

Re:Subscription Only Science = evil

[Compholio]

Restricting knowledge only serves to retard growth, and keep the 'special ones' in power.

Giving people the knowledge that the "special ones" have power over them won't change that fact, it will just frighten them and laws will be passed to restrict research. As long as material is free to move throughout the community that understands its implications you won't be retarding growth. If you want to get access to this kind of material you should hope you have an educational system that allows people to enter into the community and participate. Free informational access is not always a good thing - unequal education makes information dangerous in the wrong hands.

Re:Subscription Only Science = evil

[cot]

The only valuable service provided by publishers at this point is that they handle peer review. A reputable journal's review process is useful.

A reputable online journal could certainly cut publication costs, but I'm not sure how you get peer review without someone paying for it at some level.

Re:What happened to mail order electronics?

[kfg]

Well, an optical mouse is actually a rather complex piece of work that goes a bit beyond a sensor (which in the case of a mouse is actually a minicam), just pull the circuit board from one and have a look. Then add in the cost of the plug, wire, etc.

Mice are cheap, and you can use the time you would have spent designing and building a data acquisition unit doing your real work.

Where I can't get what I want, or where what I want cost thousands of dollars when I can build it myself, better, for ten, I build, and I'm glad to do it.

When I can buy what I need off the shelf for twenty five dollars, or spend a week designing and building it myself for twenty dollars, well, I usually just go buy the sucker (unless I'm simply smitten by the intellectual challange of the thing for some reason).

But here is what I suppose is the biggest reason for using the mouse:

The software is already written, so you can just plug it in and it works.

KFG

Re:Fun experiment

[Anonymous Coward]

Thing is that it's not really limited by the resolution of the mouse but by the screen's resolution. If the screen only has 1280 columns you simply won't see the cursor moving even if the mouse told the computer "hey move!"