Patching Into An Optical Mouse With A PIC

January 28, 2011 by Mike Szczys 12 Comments

[MikyMouse] cracked open a couple different optical mice (or is it mouses?) in order to play with the data communications coming off of the chips inside. Once he figured out the protocol, it wasn’t too hard to grab the data for use in his own projects. The chip that controls the mouse is one of two he looked at, either an ADNS2051 or an ADNS2610. They run at 5V and use serial communications via SDIO and SCK pins. The clip after the break shows the test apparatus displaying coordinates of the mouse on an LCD screen. This seems like an easy and inexpensive way to get position data from your project. The only tricky part is going to be deciding when and how to to zero out the location.

Not interested in this type of mouse hack? Can we spark your curiosity with this mouse auto-fire project?

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Reminder: Santa-Pede Challenge Ending Soon

January 28, 2011 by Caleb Kraft 9 Comments

This is just a friendly reminder that our Santa-Pede challenge will be ending soon. Please send your submissions to us by emailing them to bbb@hackaday.com or by posting them in the projects section of our forum (did we mention we have a forum now?) by the end of January to be considered. We don’t care how silly, stupid, simple,or slick it is, just send it to us! We have some fun prizes from Adafruit and Make and even have [Phillip Torrone] as a judge. Get those submissions in ASAP.

Monitoring The Engine Control Unit

January 28, 2011 by Mike Szczys 17 Comments

Is there a place in the dashboard of your high performance automobile for this Engine Control Unit feedback panel? There’s several methods of showing information at work here. The row of LEDs at the top of the bezel provide RPM feedback. The two red LEDs with chrome bezels are alarm indicators. But that big OLED display is the centerpiece of the unit. Not only can you scroll through a myriad of display options, but the screen packs more than enough contrast to be readable during the day. It looks like [Mathieu] is selling these units and has decided not to release source code because of this, but there’s a schematic available and a video after the break shows the menu system from which you can draw inspiration.

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Touch Screen Jukebox

January 28, 2011 by Caleb Kraft 5 Comments

We went “live” with our forums less than 24 hours ago and we already have our first project ready for the front page. [Elementix] has shown us his touch screen jukebox build. Using an assortment of car audio speakers and amplifiers hooked up to an old Pentium 4 PC with 120 Gigs of storage, he put together the base cabinet. The touchscreen is an ebay find and he built a custom enclosure for that part. For the interface, he started with “Jukebox Arcade”, a jukebox front end for mame cabinets but found he could easily manipulate the layout since it used an xml file for the settings. After some trial and error, and a little work with the gimp, he got it looking the way he wanted. If you haven’t been there already, you should really check out our new forums.