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. "

And this is what he saw through that mouse's eyes:

Nothing for you to see here. Please move along.

I envy

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

cool, but eh

Pretty cool, wish it could of had better results, image is crap and doesnt even look like there is anywhere you can go to make a cheapscanner from a $15 optical mouse, but interesting hack, might try it myself over the summer.

groovy

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

Hey cool ! ...

... He even used it to create his web page.

If a mouse can do this...

...imagine if you get a Geforce to do password crack. Duh!

Wow

This is definatly the ultimate in low tech.

Still, it is ingenuis.

Well

At least this hack is a little funny. I have been wondering about a mouse with force-feedback and then I can't wait until I see the mouse wander over the edge of the table when infected by some strange virus...

What resolution is it possible to get with the laser mice that you can get?

Re:Nevermind.

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.

a spy scanner!

Just use any sensitive document as a mouse pad......

This is what the original design was for: Capshare

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

more of the sam? go here:

http://hackaday.com/ [hackaday.com]

confused

Are we supposed to send him a gift scanner? Clothes? Food? Matches for starting fires? :D

Scan-mouse

It was promtply purchased by DARPA on a hunch that it might be able to see through concrete...

But the real question is...

could he turn a flatbed scanner into an optical mouse?

Re:But the real question is...

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.

Re: It has been done.

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. [freenet.de]

I have a copy on my phone. It works, but is quite hard to use.

Oh dear!

Now the cats out the bag, I expect the next generation of MS worms and viruses won't need keyloggers - they will just WATCH you type in your passwords/CC numbers etc...

It's useful enough...

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

It's all biological...

I heard of building a better mousetrap... but hacking a mouse?! If you're going to experiment with biology, just hack a frog and leave the mouse out of this.

impressive

if only because some of my students won't stop shining the mouse into the iSight...

Server seems a bit slow

At least for me the page didn't load at first.

http://sprite.student.utwente.nl.nyud.net:8090/~je roen/projects/mouseeye/ [nyud.net]

Jury rig?

Isnt it Jerry rig? as in botched german (Jerry) equipment in WWII

B&W Handscanner?

Seriously, who the hell needs black and white scans of hands? THE GOVERNMENT, THAT'S WHO!

Paranoid twin powers, ACTIVATE! Form of Tinfoil, shape of Hat!

The "sun-like mark" on the chip...

... 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.

Further modifications=Barcode scanner?

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 :-))

It would appear...

...that his mousepad is white and has the number "4", followed by a "0", and another "4" on it

What about barcodes

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.

Cue Cat

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...)

Seeds?

I wonder if this could be a cheap way to gather random seeds...

Off I go to tie my wireless mouse to my cat!

what ever happened to hand scanners

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.

Re:what ever happened to hand scanners

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.

extra security measure....

besides barcode scanning possibilities, how about an additional login security measure....scan your thumb print plus password.

I know ghetto gets thrown around a lot......

but I live in the ghetto you insensitive clod!!!!!

Good Idea but..

A very good idea... but its at nascent stage.....If some s/w companies are going to have a full fledged software to convert Optical mouse to scanner , it'll be great.Probably Google will do it.....Free Google Mousescan !

Optical Mouse Chips

You can use the chips for optical navigation too. I played around with one for an introductory robotics class, here [cmu.edu].

Laser Mice

I know laser mice are supposed to detect a clearer image of the surface below, would be interesting to see this done with a laser mouse.

Via USB?

Could it be possible to write a driver to be able to use this application through a standard USB or PS/2 connection, without the need to rewire it?

How hard, and what strategy to coordinate

the little pieces of each "saccade" of the mouse ... after
all that is what the human brain does ... it pieces all our
shaky random movements together into a steady picture of the
world ... any ideas?

Idea: Cute! Hack: ~

1. Notice optical mice have a iddy biddy CCD
2. Grab a datasheet
3. Wire it up
4. Take 1 free I/O parallel port library [logix4u.net] under "no explicit licence" for non-commercial use.
5. Write ~180 lines of Visual Basic
6. Start selling optical mice scanners to Digg'ers? (after getting "explicit commercial licence" for I/O library.)
7. Profit!

Nice idea for a hack, but let's see you do something with like read a barcode or OCR a sentence :P

Reminds me of this C64 hack...

This is a pretty cool hack, even though its usefulness is debatable. Still, that's the spirit of hacking. It kinda reminded me of this guy who made a scanner for his C64 with a photocell and lego blocks...

http://www.sentex.net/~mwandel/tech/tech.html [sentex.net]

Even today, that's neat. He even turned a scanner into a digital camera.

Sounds like Thunderscan.

AKA turn your printer into a scanner [folklore.org].

Reversing the course of history

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.

Shocking

I am appalled at the use of the term ghetto. Go ahead. Blame the victim.

Hook up a different lens to your mouse...

and you could have a black and white camera with 0.000324 mega pixels!

Same hack works with your monitor

A similar hack actually works with your monitor to take a picture of whatever is in front of your computer. There is a demo at this site:

http://www.geocities.com/Heartland/Acres/3072/came ra2.html [geocities.com]

But...

Does it run Linux?

ghetto b&w handscanner

Of course it only understands ebonics

Poor images..

At first I thought it was one of those typical Frontpage-generated sites that overlap images with text, but it turns out he used screenshots and didn't even match the images with the windows he wanted to show, so we're seeing random garbage around them. The pink/green effect on the gray areas is indicative that he's using 16-bit, so yes, this guy could use a new graphics card. Fairly neat hack, but combine it with for instance ALE's video mode for proper effect.

Mindstorms anyone?

This is a million times cooler than the guy who claimed to have played sound from a scanned images of a phonograph record. I wonder how good an image you could get with a Mindstorms machine to move the mouse back and forth? [don't look at me, I have enough unfinished projects]

Re:ya..Verry impressive and all...

The program is written in Visual Basic. So no.

Re:ya..Verry impressive and all...

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.

Re:ya..Verry impressive and all...

see :

http://wxpython.org/ [wxpython.org]

it's even cross platform

Re:ya..Verry impressive and all...

is this enough bindings ?

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

        * [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

Re:Repost from hack-a-day

Yes, via the digg.com front page, it would appear.

Re:OUTGOING

I think they are one-time-pad messages from terruhists.

Or designed to look that way.