Turn an Optical Mouse into a Scanner 191
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. "
more of the sam? go here: (Score:3, Informative)
Re:ya..Verry impressive and all... (Score:5, Informative)
The "sun-like mark" on the chip... (Score:5, Informative)
Just thought I'd throw that out there.
Re:ya..Verry impressive and all... (Score:5, Informative)
http://wxpython.org/ [wxpython.org]
it's even cross platform
Re:what ever happened to hand scanners (Score:3, Informative)
Yes. My digital camera. (seriously, I've made digital copies of pages from books, contracts and artwork with my camera).
This is what the original design was for: Capshare (Score:5, Informative)
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
Re:ya..Verry impressive and all... (Score:4, Informative)
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:Hey cool ! ... (Score:3, Informative)
I thought that at first too, but soon realised that it was just some text at the bottom of one of his screen shots [utwente.nl].