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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

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