Are you using a desk mouse like some kind of… normal computer user? Why, beg the heavens? For you could be using an air mouse, of your very own creation! [Misfit Maker] shows the way. Check out what he made in the video below.
An air mouse is a mouse you use in the air—which creates at least one major challenge. Since you’re not sliding along a surface, you can’t track the motion by mechanical friction like a ball mouse or by imaging as in an optical mouse. Instead, this build relies on a gyroscope sensor to track motion and translate that into pointer commands. The build relies on an ESP32-C3 as the microcontroller at the heart of things. It communicates with an MPU6050 gyroscope and accelerometer to track motion in space. It then communicates as a human interface device over Bluetooth, so you can use it with lots of different devices. The mouse buttons—plus media control buttons—are all capacitive touch-sensitive, thanks to an MPR121 touch sensor module.
There’s something neat about building your own tools to interface with the machines, almost like it helps meld the system to your whims. We see a lot of innovative mouse and HID projects around these parts.
Cool. Reminiscent of the Gyration Air Mouse from the turn of the century. I’m sure the new IMU is an improvement over the gyroscopes used in that one — they drifted like crazy.
I’ve had a P5 pointer glove, your arms learn to appreciate the mouse being on the desk after a while.
Waiting for smart clay.
Very impressive build.
For folks skeptical of air mice, there’s a slew of $10 USB “TV remotes” online that feature an air mouse feature. I cut the cord years ago and my TV has a PC connected to it and while Kodi works great with keyboard navigation, sometimes a mouse is helpful.
I honestly couldn’t believe how well it worked, especially on such a cheap device.
I have one of those although it’s really for those android sticks that use to be popular.
Any link to one of them?
The opposite use works too.
I have several Android based smart TVs.
(Rooted, de-bloated, and de-Googled)
Since they are a TV, they obviously lack touch controls, which means they are “incompatible” with the majority of android applications.
Many apps work fine most of the time if they are sideloaded, with most of the functionality intact.
But some just don’t work well with ONLY the directional keys, okay, and back.
Android has surprisingly good keyboard and mouse support.
It still doesn’t completely replace (multi)touch support, but it will make many more applications usable.
It can even be taken to the extreme by side loading remote desktop applications, including the Microsoft one, to turn a TV + mouse + keyboard into a workable thin client.
You could even install one of the chroot environments that let you run a (somewhat limited) Linux distro as an app. Though the Android TVs I own are pretty anemic. A desktop OS is probably not great on a minimally specced TV.