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. "

Comments

groovy

[Anonymous Coward]

Groovy .. may come handy in places where scanners need special permissions.

Wow

[Q-Hack!]

This is definatly the ultimate in low tech.

Still, it is ingenuis.

Re:Wow

[ian_mackereth]

Low tech? You're using an 18x18 pixel video camera that takes over a thousand snapshots a second of the shadows of your desk, then uses a DSP to calculate the differences between those images and thus how far and in what direction the mouse has moved, and you call it LOW TECH?!!

And all this in a chip that costs the manufacturer about a buck.

Perspective!

It's useful enough...

[Anonymous Coward]

...to make a cheap barcode scanner. Barcodes have checksums, and if every other pass works it's good enough.

What about barcodes

[Senzei]

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.

Re:what ever happened to hand scanners

[SharpFang]

Handscanners had LOTS of disadvantages compared to flatbeds. Poor resolution resulting from uneven movement speed (flatbed can go as slow as you desire. User moves the handscanner slightly faster and data gets lost.), small width - need for "stitching", poor absolute distance/shape quality (turn it a little, let it slide a bit etc), poor tollerance for uneven surfaces (try to scan a page in a thick book, the roll of the scanner falls off the book when the scanning element is still 5cm into the text) and quite a few other serious disadvantages. The guy advising you a camera is right. I have a Logitech handscanner and a cheap Canon camera, and the camera produces better images than the scanner. Not to mention it's vastly faster :) In great most cases camera suffices. Only if you need -huge- image in good resolution (I mean like 10000x10000px) the scanner makes sense, but you rarely do. And definitely not with a laptop, on a travel.
One more handy thing. You won't scan a 2mx3m train schedule hanging on the wall, no matter if you use handscanner or a flatbed. Camera is just right for that.