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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. "
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.
Yes, via the digg.com front page, it would appear.
AT&ROFLMAO
Or turn a camera-equipped mobile phone into an optical mouse? Preferrably with bluetooth support using the built-in phone BT chip! It should only be some programming to get it to work, right? Finally a sensible use for cameraphones.
)9TSS
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.
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.
I wonder if this could be a cheap way to gather random seeds...
Off I go to tie my wireless mouse to my cat!
Yeah...this low tech thing also reminds me of someone trying to use a sound card as an oscilloscope (through the mic)...or how someone used the sensor on a logitech trackball device to track how a fly walks (the fly walks on a light ball colored in such a way that the sensor could still read it).
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
You can use the chips for optical navigation too. I played around with one for an introductory robotics class, here.
Yawn.
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.
Actually, that's what the sensor+optics is. The mouse is likely to report movement by one pixel reliably, unless it does some good sub-pixel image comparison (which isn't impossible...).
Thing is you can get about any DPI you desire (up to the limit of light wave length) from such a rig by replacing the optics. You're still stuck with readout area of some 16x16 pixels though, so lower resolution = better, meaning less waving your hand to "wipe" whole area of the document.
45 5F E1 04 22 CA 29 C4 93 3F 95 05 2B 79 2A B2
Because of that I did learn a bit about the different types of bar codes. This was in 1995 so the following is just based on memory, I might have some minor errors in the following. The bar code type that is used to identify products is called EAN-13 (European Article Numbering, 13 digits). An EAN-13 bar code usually looks like the following (footnote 1):
9 || 780201 || 708424 ||
Both the black and "white" lines in the bar code are used. Lines are either thin or thick (as far as I remember thick lines are either exactly two times the width of the thin ones or slightly thicker (maybe it was 2.5 times?)). The bar code start with three thin lines (start sync) and the the black sync lines are usually printed slightly longer than the rest. In the middle there are some additional sync lines as well as at the end.
Each digit is encoded as five bars (black and white) in a 2+3 mix of thick/thin. There are defined three groups of different 2+3 combinations, Number Group A, B and C, i.e. Number Group A contains 10 different 2+3 combinations, B contains 10 others and C yet 10 others, The six first digits are either number group A or B, the six last are always number group C. The 2+3 combinations in number group C is the same as those in A but backwards. This means that if the six first digits decoded from the pulses from the bar code reader all are number group A, then you know that you are reading the bar code backwards.
The combination of A and B used on the six first digits determines the 13th digit, so only 12 of the digits are coded directly with bars.
Footnote 1 :(
Originally I wrote an ascii art drawing here, but slashdot complained "Lameness filter encountered. Post aborted! Reason: Please use fewer 'junk' characters." so I had to remove it...
When you are sure of something, you probably are wrong (search for "Unskilled and Unaware of It").
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.