Bookmark, share, and hop your favorite sites with SiteHoppin Toolbar for Firefox!

Back: DIY HACK - How to make your own White Board Plotter!

Forward: What a Waste! - Mazda destroys 4,703 shiny new cars worth $100 million!


DIY HACK - How to use your Optical Mouse as a scanner!

Posted in Cool, DoItYourself!, Educational, Entertainment, Hack, Projects by max on the May 1st, 2008 at 12:33 am

DIY HACK - How to use your Optical Mouse as a scanner!

DIY HACK - How to use your Optical Mouse as a scanner!2

Here’s a really cool hack that let’s you use your optical mouse as a scanner.

Are you using an optical mouse right now? Ever wanted to see your desktop through the eye on the bottom of it? Me neither, I already know I have to clean my desktop :-)

People get bored sometimes, and when I get bored I sometimes open up stuff to find out what makes it tick. One time, I did this with an old optical mouse. Well, a mouse only has 2 chips inside: the optical sensor and a chip for the usb/ps2-interfacing. I looked up the datasheet of the optical sensor (which is an ADNS2610) and it told me the sensor has a tiny 18×18 CCD, which can be read out using the serial port (the one which normally interfaces to the PS2/USB-chip).

So I start Visual Basic (I usually do my stuff under Linux, but I’m no star at using anything graphical like QT or GTK, so for this quick’n'dirty project I fell back in my old habits) and hack something up using a few wires to the trusty ole parallel port. The result: crisp lo-res b&w imaging :-)

(Thanks Joe for the tip!)

[via] spritesmods , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Related posts

, , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,


1 Star2 Stars3 Stars4 Stars5 Stars (No Ratings Yet)
Loading ... Loading ...


If you like this post then please subscribe to my full feed RSS. You can also subscribe by Email.

Got a new hack, DIY, howto, or gadget? Tip us here.

Search for a Hack:


Bookmark It!


|Digg it |SiteHoppin |Wagg It | TrackBack |




Email this to a Friend Email This Post Email This Post

RSS feed

2 Comments »

Comment by HiFi Guy Subscribed to comments via email
2008-05-01 03:23:58

You gonna be the next James Bond with a such scanner :p

MyAvatars 0.2
 
Comment by Studio Equipment
2008-05-01 18:10:30

Fantastic Max. Congratulations. Sad it is only B&W LR though!

MyAvatars 0.2
 
Name (required)
E-mail (required - never shown publicly)
URI

Subscribe to comments via email
Your Comment (smaller size | larger size)
You may use <a href="" title=""> <abbr title=""> <acronym title=""> <b> <blockquote cite=""> <cite> <code> <del datetime=""> <em> <i> <q cite=""> <strike> <strong> in your comment.