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Turn an Optical Mouse into a Scanner
John H. Doe writes "This student was bored one day, so he decided to see what the world looked like from the bottom of his optical mouse. He jury rigged a few wires to his parallel port and wrote a program to take a look. And seeing as how one thing a mouse does is to detect motion, made it into a ghetto b&w handscanner. "
Nothing for you to see here. Please move along.
You can't handle the truth.
I envy this hacker's skills, B+W? I'd only see red.
Pretty cool, wish it could of had better results, image is crap and doesnt even look like there is anywhere you can go to make a cheapscanner from a $15 optical mouse, but interesting hack, might try it myself over the summer.
Well, Slashdot is going down hill. PlayfullyClever
Are we just syndicating from Hack-a-day's RSS feed nowadays?
Groovy .. may come handy in places where scanners need special permissions.
bu bu but does it run Linux?
... He even used it to create his web page.
A slashdotting - you get the stick first and then the carrot !
...imagine if you get a Geforce to do password crack. Duh!
http://www.michel.eti.br
This is definatly the ultimate in low tech.
Still, it is ingenuis.
Some days I get the sinking feeling Orwell was an optimist.
What resolution is it possible to get with the laser mice that you can get?
If builders built buildings the way programmers wrote programs, then the first woodpecker would destroy civilization.
Just use any sensitive document as a mouse pad......
You can't handle the truth.
http://hackaday.com/
The software is written in VB, how ugly can it get.
So the question is not "Does it run linux?" but "Is there a linux version?".
And I'am curious if this site can be slashdotted.
200GB/2TB $7.95 Coupon: SAVE90DOLLAR
Logitech claims 800DPI for the MX1000.
Belief is the currency of delusion.
Sorry, that's movement resolution (after whatever processing they do). Thinko on my part. I'm sure the sensor isn't all that. Still be interesting to "see" though.
Belief is the currency of delusion.
Are we supposed to send him a gift scanner? Clothes? Food? Matches for starting fires? :D
slashdot: where everyone yells sarcastic metaphors to themselves to understand the issue
It was promtply purchased by DARPA on a hunch that it might be able to see through concrete...
could he turn a flatbed scanner into an optical mouse?
Now the cats out the bag, I expect the next generation of MS worms and viruses won't need keyloggers - they will just WATCH you type in your passwords/CC numbers etc...
It means you're are stupid.
Or designed to look that way.
...to make a cheap barcode scanner. Barcodes have checksums, and if every other pass works it's good enough.
I heard of building a better mousetrap... but hacking a mouse?! If you're going to experiment with biology, just hack a frog and leave the mouse out of this.
if only because some of my students won't stop shining the mouse into the iSight...
"Win treats sysadmins better than users. Mac treats users better than sysadmins. Linux treats everyone like sysadmins."
At least for me the page didn't load at first.
e roen/projects/mouseeye/
http://sprite.student.utwente.nl.nyud.net:8090/~j
If you wanna get rich, you know that payback is a bitch
Isnt it Jerry rig? as in botched german (Jerry) equipment in WWII
-AlexC
Seriously, who the hell needs black and white scans of hands? THE GOVERNMENT, THAT'S WHO!
Paranoid twin powers, ACTIVATE! Form of Tinfoil, shape of Hat!
... is from Agilent Technologies (which just spun off its semiconductor business). For 65-years Agilent was also known was "Hewlett-Packard." In late 1999, HP spun everything but computers and prnters off into Agilent. (This past Dec 1, Agilent's semiconductors became Avago.)
Just thought I'd throw that out there.
With a bi more tweaking to the code, the mouse could possibly be made into a linear, perhaps even 2D :-)) barcode scanner. Barcode scanners can be expensive. Optical mice don't come cheap, but cost significantly less than a barcode scanner, could this be the next generation of the CueCat, made at home? Also, your killing two birds with one stone, as it's multifunctional. Mind you, it still isn't as good as that MP3 playing toothbrush I got for Christmas :-))
-- There are 10 types of people in the world: Those who understand binary, And those who don't.
...that his mousepad is white and has the number "4", followed by a "0", and another "4" on it
You're using her as bait, Master!
It's is means you're are stupid.
I turned my old Epson dot matrix printer into a scanner by mounting a CDS cell on the print head and wiring it to my Atari 1200XL paddle port and using BASIC to run the print head across the paper and take a reading. It was like 30dpi resolution, but I got some great scans of the cover of Rush' "Permanent Waves". I had no friends.
if you hadn't stolen it from yesterday's hackaday.
When I first saw this I thought it would be useful to turn the mouse into a barcode reader. A quick look at prices shows them starting at around forty bucks. If this could be made to work roughly as well as the barcode readers it might be pretty useful.
Slashdot: Where anecdotes and generalizations can be freely substituted for facts, logic, or intelligence
I seem to recall that something similar was done with that unmitigating disaster known as cue cat :-)
Y'know - I don't really care how crap the images are - the point of this execise is all about
hacking because it's there. I think this is pretty cool. Would I every replicate this hack or have value
for it? -- probably not. But it's cool just for coolness sake. And one never knows when a cool hack will be
something you would use (if not today, maybe tomorrow...)
Rich people are eccentric. Poor people are strange. Me, I'd be happy with odd.
Some people are Sooo handy!
I wonder if this could be a cheap way to gather random seeds...
Off I go to tie my wireless mouse to my cat!
In Soviet Russia, mouse watches YOU!
Down With Slashdot BETA!!! I've been around the corner and seen the oliphant; you can only abuse me from your perspecti
This was on digg first. Let's not leech off digg, shall we?
"Let us raise a standard to which the wise and honest can repair" - George Washington
Its a shame really. Hand scanners seemed to ahve peaked in popularity before their time. I understand that they were popular because they were a lot cheaper to build that flatbeds, and as flatbeds came down in price, the hand scanners died away. Seems perfectly reasonable since the handscanner was a pretty ppor match for a desktop computer anyway. The only problem with this was that as the price of flatbeds fell, so did the price of laptops, now a lot of folks have laptops, and hand scanners would be perfect to throw in the laptop bag.... If you are in a library or somehwhere and need a quick scan, the hand scanner would have been perfect. But I have not been able to find a single color hand scanner that will run with XP, which is what I run on my laptop. If I could find one, I'd buy it in a heartbeat. The last time I needed a scan of something when I was not at home, I ended up puling out my digital camera (which I had with me for another reason, and snapping a picture. This was not the ideal situation, but it worked for what I needed. How often do you have a good digital camera with you (not the crappy one in your cell phone)
Does anyone know of a handscanner compatible with XP? I'd still like to have one.
I reject your reality
besides barcode scanning possibilities, how about an additional login security measure....scan your thumb print plus password.
but I live in the ghetto you insensitive clod!!!!!
... and a hack that adds in teh pass thru inside the mouse?
This article is a direct rip from hack a day and should be removed. If the Slashdot crew can't come up with stories that are original, they need to go ahead and shut down.
A very good idea... but its at nascent stage.....If some s/w companies are going to have a full fledged software to convert Optical mouse to scanner , it'll be great.Probably Google will do it.....Free Google Mousescan !
Why does yahoo do this
wish it could of had better results, image is crap... So, which is more pathetic? The hack or this response?
"Our interests are to see if we can't scale it up to something more exciting," he said.
You can use the chips for optical navigation too. I played around with one for an introductory robotics class, here.
Yawn.
because you have nothing better to do than to read about this on /. and then whine about it.
"Our interests are to see if we can't scale it up to something more exciting," he said.
I know laser mice are supposed to detect a clearer image of the surface below, would be interesting to see this done with a laser mouse.
That kind of "undocumented feature" reminds me of this. I was stunned when I watched the video of the scanner in action; it's incredible how much "power" is hidden within most electrical devices!
My other account has mod points.
Could it be possible to write a driver to be able to use this application through a standard USB or PS/2 connection, without the need to rewire it?
Someone has already done it.
Check out wabbellab It is a marble madness style game for Nokia Series 60 smart-phones, that uses the phone's camera to detect tilt of the phone. Source code is available under a GNU Licence.
I have a copy on my phone. It works, but is quite hard to use.
the little pieces of each "saccade" of the mouse
all that is what the human brain does
shaky random movements together into a steady picture of the
world
no, but someone turned a scanner into a soundcard... http://www.ganjatron.net/misc/scanjet/scanjet.html
Hehe. You beat me to it.
Nice idea for a hack, but let's see you do something with like read a barcode or OCR a sentence
This is very funny from a historical note.
Most optical mice have a chipset from agilent (look for the * logo on the bottom). It was originally designed for a portable scanner, HP Capshare, that had battery+scanner+IR link on it.
The trick in the box is stiching software; you would scan back and forth, turning it on a page without lifting it, and the firmware would work out what the content was. Like optical mice, it doesnt work on shiny pages.
The product crashed and burned, but at least the silicion could be turned into mouse silicon instead, and in the process actually increasing the selling price of a mouse. Who wants a no-good ball mouse, the junk you get bundled with a PC?
I still have a capshare scanner; its actually quite useful for discreetly scanning bits of books at the local university.
I have an inherited
... you plan on using your keyboard as your mousepad...
... and your mouse as the utencil to press the keys with...
... and you press each key slowly enough for the letters to register and not be a big blur...
... and that the hackers feel like flipping through thousands of key-strokes to find any coherent meaning...
.. and that... you get the idea.
Nobody's gay for Mole-Man.
Well, hell, boy! Y'all ain't frum 'round here now, is ya? Iffin ya wuz, yood kno t'was jury rig. I tell you whut...
This is a pretty cool hack, even though its usefulness is debatable. Still, that's the spirit of hacking. It kinda reminded me of this guy who made a scanner for his C64 with a photocell and lego blocks...
http://www.sentex.net/~mwandel/tech/tech.html
Even today, that's neat. He even turned a scanner into a digital camera.
Geforces are great password crackers. 15 to 16 times faster than a PC on a plaintext attack.
8hour max to 30 mins Max to do the crack.
Partical cracks run great on Geforces.
AKA turn your printer into a scanner.
The HP CapShare camera was a handheld scanner. As HP (and later Agilent) realized that the same technology they were using for scanning strips of pages relied on the sense of direction, the product was repurposed (and redesigned etc) as a mouse. So, there is nothing new here.... presumably a quick patent search can prove this out.
I am appalled at the use of the term ghetto. Go ahead. Blame the victim.
fast as fast can be. you'll never catch me.
and you could have a black and white camera with 0.000324 mega pixels!
War crimes, torture, lies, illegal spying... Would someone give Bush a blowjob, already, so he can be impeached?
Docupen.
doesn't need the computer until you want to dump.
every day http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Random
...at the local university I have an inherited
Dude, you're the man - a whole university?
Your hybrid is not saving the environment. Its purpose is to make you feel good about buying something.
A similar hack actually works with your monitor to take a picture of whatever is in front of your computer. There is a demo at this site:
e ra2.html
http://www.geocities.com/Heartland/Acres/3072/cam
Does it run Linux?
The term "jury rig" comes from Latin, of course, "de jure" (pronounced about 'day jury') meaning "for the day".
The World Wide Web is dying. Soon, we shall have only the Internet.
Of course it only understands ebonics
Use your head, can't you, use your head,
You're on earth, there's no cure for that - S. Beckett
At first I thought it was one of those typical Frontpage-generated sites that overlap images with text, but it turns out he used screenshots and didn't even match the images with the windows he wanted to show, so we're seeing random garbage around them. The pink/green effect on the gray areas is indicative that he's using 16-bit, so yes, this guy could use a new graphics card. Fairly neat hack, but combine it with for instance ALE's video mode for proper effect.
This is a million times cooler than the guy who claimed to have played sound from a scanned images of a phonograph record. I wonder how good an image you could get with a Mindstorms machine to move the mouse back and forth? [don't look at me, I have enough unfinished projects]
> Dude, you're the man - a whole university?
Only a little one, that issues degrees and doctorates by email. you may have got some of our adverts in your inbox.
We specialise in a limited number of courses
-nigerian banking
-0EM software
-Phishing; basic and advanced.
The Phishing course is becoming more popular, as we actually offer a discount on the degree if you successfully collect the SSNs and banking details of a thousand new individuals. You may also be interested in a doctorate, though as PhDs require actual work, you'll need to spend time writing and monitoring the phishnets that I'm devising.
-steve