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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.
Groovy .. may come handy in places where scanners need special permissions.
... He even used it to create his web page.
A slashdotting - you get the stick first and then the carrot !
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/
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?
The program is written in Visual Basic. So no.
Note to mods: I'm probably being sarcastic.
Yes, via the digg.com front page, it would appear.
AT&ROFLMAO
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.
...to make a cheap barcode scanner. Barcodes have checksums, and if every other pass works it's good enough.
... 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.
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
...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!
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.
I wonder if this could be a cheap way to gather random seeds...
Off I go to tie my wireless mouse to my cat!
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
but I live in the ghetto you insensitive clod!!!!!
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
That's because he turned his old Zip drive into a web-server.
Also FatPhil on SoylentNews, id 863
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
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