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Turn an Optical Mouse into a Scanner

Posted by CmdrTaco on from the because-you-can dept.

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. "

8 of 191 comments (clear)

  1. more of the sam? go here: by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Informative

    http://hackaday.com/

  2. Re:ya..Verry impressive and all... by Helios1182 · · Score: 4, Informative

    It was a quick and dirty hack. He even said he doesn't like VB, but for a simple GUI it is easy. The source is available so you are welcome to port it to whatever language/plaatform you like.

  3. The "sun-like mark" on the chip... by CMiYC · · Score: 5, Informative

    ... 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.

  4. Re:ya..Verry impressive and all... by DrSkwid · · Score: 4, Informative

    see :

    http://wxpython.org/

    it's even cross platform

    --
    There are places where the networks are not touching,and there are places where they are-Boeing's Lori Gunter
  5. Re:what ever happened to hand scanners by Laplace · · Score: 2, Informative
    Does anyone know of a handscanner compatible with XP? I'd still like to have one.

    Yes. My digital camera. (seriously, I've made digital copies of pages from books, contracts and artwork with my camera).

    --
    The middle mind speaks!
  6. This is what the original design was for: Capshare by steve_l · · Score: 4, Informative

    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

  7. Re:ya..Verry impressive and all... by DrSkwid · · Score: 3, Informative

    is this enough bindings ?

    for actual links see
    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WxWidgets

            * [1] binding wxBasic for the BASIC programming language
            * [2] binding wxPerl for the Perl programming language
            * [3] binding wxPython for the Python programming language
            * [4] binding wxRuby for the Ruby programming language in September 2004 "early beta"
            * [5] binding wxSqueak for the Smalltalk programming language
            * wxLua for Lua; a Sourceforge.net project is also available here
            * wx4j for Java
            * wxJS for JavaScript
            * wxHaskell for Haskell
            * wxEiffel for the Eiffel programming language
            * wx.NET for C#/.NET
            * wxCL (formerly wxLisp) for Common Lisp

    --
    There are places where the networks are not touching,and there are places where they are-Boeing's Lori Gunter
  8. Re:Hey cool ! ... by amembleton · · Score: 2, Informative
    The text got warped under his pictures

    I thought that at first too, but soon realised that it was just some text at the bottom of one of his screen shots.