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Turn an Optical Mouse into a Scanner 191

Posted by CmdrTaco
from the because-you-can dept.
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. "
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Turn an Optical Mouse into a Scanner More

Turn an Optical Mouse into a Scanner

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  • Nothing for you to see here. Please move along.

  • I envy (Score:5, Funny)

    by Irashtar (836973) <(moc.liamg) (ta) (rathsarI)> on Sunday January 08 2006, @11:24AM (#14421781)
    I envy this hacker's skills, B+W? I'd only see red.
    • Good point...since it's only a red light, would it only pick up red wavelengths?

      Would that further mean that optical mice don't work on a pure blue surface?
  • 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.
    • doesnt even look like there is anywhere you can go to make a cheapscanner

      Dunno, improving the software to match up successive images better should be prefectly possible, it's hard to say exactly how good a result could be achieved, but I'd say a lot better than the posted image. You could also hack in multiple coloured LEDs, and thus possibly make a colour scanner. Probably never actually be useful though, hard to say.
      • I have a canon scanner which uses LIDE (LED Indirect Exposure) technology to do the scanner rather than the older style light bulb. You can't actually see the LEDs, it uses a lot of really small ones, but I think it has R, G, and B LEDs. I think he is just applying the same technology, only without as many lights, and with not as much precision.
    • wish it could of had better results, image is crap... So, which is more pathetic? The hack or this response?

  • groovy (Score:3, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward on Sunday January 08 2006, @11:25AM (#14421786)
    Groovy .. may come handy in places where scanners need special permissions.
    • places where scanners need special permissions

      Indeed my first thought, paranoid security drones might find this a terrorists wet dream.

  • Hey cool ! ... (Score:5, Funny)

    by bushboy (112290) <lttc@lefthandedmonkeys.org> on Sunday January 08 2006, @11:26AM (#14421791) Homepage
    ... He even used it to create his web page.
    • You too huh? I thought something was wrong with my browser. The text got warped under his pictures... and too think this guy can make a scanner from a mouse but can't make a normal web page is sweet irony.
  • ...imagine if you get a Geforce to do password crack. Duh!

  • Wow (Score:4, Insightful)

    by Q-Hack! (37846) * on Sunday January 08 2006, @11:27AM (#14421798)
    This is definatly the ultimate in low tech.

    Still, it is ingenuis.

    • Re:Wow (Score:2, Interesting)

      by non0score (890022)
      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).

    • Re:Wow (Score:3, Insightful)

      by ian_mackereth (889101)
      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!

  • Well (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Z00L00K (682162) on Sunday January 08 2006, @11:28AM (#14421805) Homepage
    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?

    • Logitech claims 800DPI for the MX1000.
      • Sorry, that's movement resolution (after whatever processing they do). Thinko on my part. I'm sure the sensor isn't all that. Still be interesting to "see" though.
        • One might be able to deconvolute (anti-anti-alias, so to say) the picture from the sensor, but I would imagine that to achieve a stable 800 DPI resolution, one would actually need a sensor with a comparable, or better, sensor... unless the 800 DPI figure is a VaporNumber (TM).

        • Re:Nevermind. (Score:4, Interesting)

          by SharpFang (651121) on Sunday January 08 2006, @02:05PM (#14422591) Homepage Journal
          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.
    • Like this one [google.co.uk]?

  • a spy scanner! (Score:5, Funny)

    by roman_mir (125474) on Sunday January 08 2006, @11:29AM (#14421806) Homepage Journal
    Just use any sensitive document as a mouse pad......

    • This is what the original design was for: Capshare (Score:5, Informative)

      by steve_l (109732) on Sunday January 08 2006, @02:38PM (#14422782) Homepage
      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
      • ...at the local university I have an inherited

        Dude, you're the man - a whole university?

        • > Dude, you're the man - a whole university?

          Only a little one, that issues degrees and doctorates by email. you may have got some of our adverts in your inbox.

          We specialise in a limited number of courses
          -nigerian banking
          -0EM software
          -Phishing; basic and advanced.

          The Phishing course is becoming more popular, as we actually offer a discount on the degree if you successfully collect the SSNs and banking details of a thousand new individuals. You may also be interested in a doctorate, though as PhDs require

  • more of the sam? go here: (Score:3, Informative)

    by Anonymous Coward on Sunday January 08 2006, @11:30AM (#14421812)
    http://hackaday.com/ [hackaday.com]

  • confused (Score:5, Funny)

    by digitalsushi (137809) <slashdot@digitalsushi.com> on Sunday January 08 2006, @11:38AM (#14421843) Journal
    Are we supposed to send him a gift scanner? Clothes? Food? Matches for starting fires? :D

  • Scan-mouse (Score:5, Funny)

    by massivefoot (922746) on Sunday January 08 2006, @11:40AM (#14421846)
    It was promtply purchased by DARPA on a hunch that it might be able to see through concrete...

  • But the real question is... (Score:5, Funny)

    by EdipisReks (770738) on Sunday January 08 2006, @11:40AM (#14421848)
    could he turn a flatbed scanner into an optical mouse?
  • 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... (Score:3, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward on Sunday January 08 2006, @11:53AM (#14421908)
    ...to make a cheap barcode scanner. Barcodes have checksums, and if every other pass works it's good enough.
    • A bar code reader also stuck me as a useful modification. I wrote C code for interpreting the pulse from a bar code pen/wand as part of a project the last year of my engineering education, and replacing the pen with an optical mouse will more or less give an identical project, so this should by all means doable.

      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

  • 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.
  • if only because some of my students won't stop shining the mouse into the iSight...
  • Isnt it Jerry rig? as in botched german (Jerry) equipment in WWII
  • 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... (Score:5, Informative)

    by CMiYC (6473) on Sunday January 08 2006, @12:11PM (#14421974) Homepage
    ... 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 :-))

  • It would appear... (Score:5, Funny)

    by Robber Baron (112304) on Sunday January 08 2006, @12:13PM (#14421985) Homepage
    ...that his mousepad is white and has the number "4", followed by a "0", and another "4" on it

  • What about barcodes (Score:2, Insightful)

    by Senzei (791599)
    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.
    • When I first saw this I thought it would be useful to turn the mouse into a barcode reader.

      I think you'd have to do a lot of image correction in software in order to get something stable enough for that. In his example app, there's way too much alignment error between samples.

      Also, one of the reasons regular barcode scanners are a bit more expensive is that they use a laser with a motorized mirror (or something along those lines) so that you can do the scanning from a distance and the beam scans the barcode

  • Cue Cat (Score:4, Interesting)

    by bangzilla (534214) on Sunday January 08 2006, @12:25PM (#14422060) Journal
    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? (Score:3, Interesting)

    by adolfojp (730818) on Sunday January 08 2006, @12:27PM (#14422071)
    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 (Score:5, Interesting)

    by wcb4 (75520) on Sunday January 08 2006, @12:41PM (#14422150)
    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.
    • Does anyone know of a handscanner compatible with XP? I'd still like to have one.

      Yes. My digital camera. (seriously, I've made digital copies of pages from books, contracts and artwork with my camera).

      • Have you been able to get a picture good enough to run it through OCR? I used to do that all the time with the hand scanner, which was perfectly sized for a column of type.
        • Absolutely, works fine, even with my 3.0MP P&S camera, so it dosen't require anything fancy. 10pt and up seriff fonts are no problem, though if there was very small text, it might not get that. I need to test it some more. The single most important thing is good light for good contrast, even better if the light isn't aligned very close to the len's axis. Flash tends to wash it out.

    • Re:what ever happened to hand scanners (Score:5, Insightful)

      by SharpFang (651121) on Sunday January 08 2006, @01:52PM (#14422519) Homepage Journal
      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.
      • Speed of light: air=299702547m/s; vacuum=299792458m/s
        Speed of sound: air=345 m/s; vacuum=???

        I'm not sure I understand your signature.

        If you are genuinely asking what the speed of sound in a vacuum is, you need a quick physics lesson. By definition, there can be no sound in a vacuum; sound needs a medium to travel in, since it is nothing more that propagating pressure waves. Light on the other hand can travel through a vacuum because of the particle-wave duality.

        If you are merely pointing out that there is n
        • the sig of AeroIllini (726211) read:

          You can have it all; just not all at once.

          I'm not sure I understand your signature. If taken at face value, your quote indicates that you believe that it is possible to possess everything there is, everywhere. If you genuinely believe that, you need a looong physics lesson.

          If you are merely making a veiled criticism of greed and various similar themes as portrayed in movies and television shows, then it's really not very clear.

          If on the third hand you were just

        • It's just a little mean question with a built-in fallacy, tickle your brain, "ouch, it won't work". Just like these 0=1 proofs, just physics-based. The first case I thought of it was at the time of the article about the Voyager probe crossing the border where solar wind slows down below the speed of sound... speed of sound in what?!
          • OK, cool. Thanks for clarifying that.

            Yeah, I really don't put much stock in the types of comparisons the general newsmedia uses when they talk about scientific subjects. The one that sticks out in my mind was when the shuttle Columbia exploded, and CNN was scrambling to get information in the bottom screen-scroller. They were in such a rush that all kinds of incorrect things were shown, like "shuttle was traveling at mock 25" and "shuttle was traveling 25 times the speed of light". It would have been funny
    • I don't ever remember hand scanners ever being a more cost efficient solution. I bought my first flatbed scanner in '95 for just over $100. My assumption had always been that hand scanners died out because they were unweildy half-assed solutions.

      • I don't ever remember hand scanners ever being a more cost efficient solution. I bought my first flatbed scanner in '95 for just over $100. My assumption had always been that hand scanners died out because they were unweildy half-assed solutions.

        You don't remember, because 95 is too recent :). I bought my first flatbed 1-2 years after you for $60. IIRC, when I started high school (91-92?), flatbed scanners were $300 and hand scanners were $50-75 or so. Those numbers are only from memory, and are prob

        • I remember having one of the logitech ones - 24 bit color 300dpi and it was motorized so you did not have to worry about moving the things at the right speed. I bought it for $125. I also had a flatbed at work that cost $500. (this was '87or so)

          That is the kind of scanner I would like to have right now, something that I can throw in the laptop case, scan a 4x6 image reasonably fast. Does not have to have the same quality as my flatbed. I could use my camera but I do not carry my camera everywhere I go, it i
    • Docupen.

      doesn't need the computer until you want to dump.
  • besides barcode scanning possibilities, how about an additional login security measure....scan your thumb print plus password.
  • but I live in the ghetto you insensitive clod!!!!!
    • but I live in the ghetto you insensitive clod!!!!!

      Liar. If you really did, you'd be capping his ass instead of posting a rebuttal. Although, come to think of it, that would make for a pretty awesome version of Slashdot. "Slashback: North-North Soldier writes to tell us that CNN has photos of the carnage that arose when i_want_you_to_throw threw down on John H. Doe earlier this week..."

  • Optical Mouse Chips (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Stigmata669 (517894) on Sunday January 08 2006, @01:39PM (#14422445)
    You can use the chips for optical navigation too. I played around with one for an introductory robotics class, here [cmu.edu].
    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

  • I am appalled at the use of the term ghetto. Go ahead. Blame the victim.
  • and you could have a black and white camera with 0.000324 mega pixels!

  • 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]
  • Of course it only understands ebonics
  • 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]

Do not believe in miracles -- rely on them.