The software defined radio has opened up unimaginable uses of the radio spectrum for radio enthusiasts, but it’s fair to say that there’s one useful feature of an old-fashioned radio they lack when used via a computer. We’re talking of course about the tuning knob, because it represents possibly the most intuitive way to move across the bands. Never fear though, because [mircemk] has a solution. He’s converted a mouse into a tuning dial.
The scroll wheel on a mouse is nothing more than a rotary encoder, and can easily be used as a sort of tuning knob. Replacing it with a better encoder gives it a much better feel, so that’s what he’s done. An enclosure has the guts of a mouse, with the front-mounted encoder wired into where the scroll wheel would have been. The result, for a relatively small amount of work, is a tuning knob, and a peripheral we’re guessing could also have a lot of uses beyond software defined radio.
It’s not the first knob we’ve seen, for that you might want to start with the wonderfully named Tiny Knob, but it’s quite possibly one of the simplest to build. We like it.
Would be nice to see him use one button to switch quickly between the various digits of the frequency so he could rapidly get gross, medium, and fine control of the frequency sweeping instead of having to touch his touchscreen each time. Nice project.
I did something similar but for volume. I had a 2 phase digital “pot” and a spare wired mouse. I leave the rear channels on a linux box with effects and keep the mouse parked on the main slider where the knob works. A little box has the knob and left click out where I need it. Down for talk up for dance-hall dub echo, left click back to preset level where it’s parked.
Nothing more satisfying than the tactile feel of a reduction drive tuning knob combined with the audio feedback of regenerative squels on a receiver.
Very cool repurposing of a salvaged part in this project. Thanks for sharing.
With how common microcontrollers are now it would likely have been better to just get a small esp32 dev board and build it yourself rather than reusing the mouse hardware. It should be easy enough to program too and would have been much smaller than sticking a mouse in a box.
Then you could have made it act as both a mouse and keyboard and add some extra buttons.