Semi-automatic Mouse Requires No Permit

When [Kerry]’s son asked him if there was a way to make a mouse click rapidly, he knew he could take the easy way and just do it in software. But what’s the fun in that? In a sense, it’s just as easy to do it with hardware—all you have to do is find a way to change the voltage in order to simulate mouse clicks.

[Kerry] decided to use the venerable 555 timer as an astable oscillator. He wired a momentary button in parallel with the left mouse button. A 50k mini pot used as the discharge resistor allows him to dial in the sensitivity. [Kerry] found that he maxed out around 5 clicks per second when clicking the regular button, and ~20 clicks per second with the momentary button as measured here. The mouse still works normally, and now [Kerry]’s son can totally pwn n00bs without getting a repetitive stress injury. M1 your way past the break to check out [Kerry]’s build video.

There are lots of other cool things you can do with an optical mouse, like visual odometry for cars and robots.

28 thoughts on “Semi-automatic Mouse Requires No Permit

  1. Good for Kerry’s son for independently coming up with the solution. It’s a good one that has been used in mice for decades. I still have an N64 controller rigged up with a 555 that was awesome an playing ‘running’ games where you press rapidly to pick up speed.

    1. Yes, it’s been like that for a long time. He rediscovered one of the classics.

      Nowadays, I would probably use an MCU with a USB stack for extra features. It could be a composite USB device, with the CDC mouse part only sending those variable-speed clicks, and the keyboard part to playback macros and such.

    1. I was thinking the same thing.

      /On topic, I did this in the 80’s to an old Atari 2600 joystick I was using on my C64. One switch turned on the 555 to pulse and a pot sticking out the other side let me control the speed of the pulsing.

  2. Once i replaced the pcb of an optical mice with an custom one. Microswitches, wheel assembly, LED and sensor where reused but the new brain was an arduino micro with the mouse lib. It had six more buttons afterwards :)

    1. I tried to do this but doesn’t work on one mouse but does on another. I’m thinking it has to do with ur pull up pull down resistor. How would I go about adding this. I’m not sure where I would need to add the 10k resister. Please help

  3. Fun fact. Using one of these will get you banned from various Counter Strike Source Servers. I used to use a clutched scroll wheel mouse with a heavy and fast bearing and crazy high scroll rate mapped to the fire button. Turns out servers can run gun control when you fire the pistols at 100RPS. Banned!

    1. CS comes with tons of builtin limits for servers.
      Not to mention the years of reducing scripting exploits done by Valve.

      Mind you even if you reject the packets it can still flood the server I suppose if someone isn’t intelligent enough to put some sane limits on their mouse hack like this guy did.

      But I get that you are talking about the distant past, dual elites were your thing I bet.

  4. Moral of the story: don’t try to make small rectangular holes in plastic with big dremel wheels.
    Maybe use an exacto/stanley that you heated with a small burner. or drill a center hole then use a grinding bit.

  5. Tried this with 555, but couldn’t get the initial delay at 0 and at the same time the repeat rate identical after the first click and all following clicks (owing to the charge curve of the capacitor). Went with a PIC12 instead. See my .io page for a single photo (click my name).

  6. I might of used a Arduino Micro and made the timings random & added some code to adjust for the guns recoil & hooked it all up to foot switch. There was a story about an anticheat device that was hardware based to catch this kinda stuff http://www.gameref.io/. There a a few 555 designs on the web and they are fun on click games like Insane Aquarium.

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