

Conversion of cheap optical mouse to robot odometer - jgrahamc
http://blog.jgc.org/2012/09/conversion-of-cheap-optical-mouse-to.html

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somesaba
I remember reading about someone hacking this together for a sumobot 5 years
ago <http://imakeprojects.com/Projects/seeing-eye-mouse/>

In fact people have used more precise laser mice? (mouse?) lol

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noonespecial
I've been using mechanical ball mice as motor encoders for years. Inside every
one is a glorious pair of little pie-slice wheels and some phototransistor
gates.

I'm kind of bummed the they are getting hard to find as all mice everywhere
become direct optical sensor mice.

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weaksauce
That's really interesting. I was really surprised by how inexpensive but high
quality the logic analyzer was. Does anyone know of an inexpensive
oscilloscope that is similar to that?

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ChuckMcM
I've got an even cheaper one : [http://www.seeedstudio.com/depot/open-
workbench-logic-sniffe...](http://www.seeedstudio.com/depot/open-workbench-
logic-sniffer-p-612.html)

It has some limitations of course but its open source and I'm in the process
of building a USB analyzer with it.

As for scopes the Rigol ones are quite popular, and with a logic "analyzer"
(if you are an EE they aren't really logic analyzers, they are more like
channels in a binary oscilloscope) I've got a Rigol scope as well but its not
nearly as reliable or accurate as the Tek2024 which is my 'goto' scope.

A number of folks make cheap USB attached scopes which run a program on a PC
for the UX, which is nice but I've got one that came from a company now gone
that only runs on Windows 98 (or ME if it matters). And no documents on how to
make it anything else. Sad really.

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weaksauce
Wow... that is cheap. How's the software on it?

That tek scope looks like a great scope but it's also an order of magnitude
more expensive than the rigol cheap one. I was thinking more for the hobbyist
and not for someone who needs it for work and can shell out 3k for a scope. I
guess I could if I wanted to but I was hoping there was something like that
logic analyzer that was an order of magnitude cheaper than all the other ones
but still excellent build quality.

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bitwize
You know you've been working in undersea robotics for too long when you see
this and think "cool, a cheap DVL for land robots."

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thirdhaf
This sounds suspiciously like what one of my friends did about twelve years
ago for our freshman engineering project. Granted I believe these mice were
more like $50 back then. See the 21 Aug comment here as proof that I'm not
hallucinating:
[http://news.lugnet.com/robotics/handyboard/?n=*8563,-100&...](http://news.lugnet.com/robotics/handyboard/?n=*8563,-100&v=a)

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zokier
Couldn't you read the same data from the PS/2 port instead? I'd imagine that
would be much better documented, and wouldn't need hacking the hardware.

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tocomment
I'm curious how he mounted it?

