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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)"
Isn't this what mice do already?
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