Slashdot Mirror
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. "
I envy this hacker's skills, B+W? I'd only see red.
... 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.
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?
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.
... 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.
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!
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.
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