Adding Auto-fire To A Computer Mouse

December 20, 2010 by 49 Comments

[Peter Skaarup’s] been re-living the past by playing old-school games in DOSBox. He’s using a mouse as the controller but longed for the auto-fire button that many joysticks used to have. Instead of looking around for a gamepad with this feature he decided to add an auto-fire button to the mouse. He incorporated a PIC 10F200, along with a momentary push switch and a transistor. The push switch enables the autofire feature, causing the transistor to short the left mouse button about seventeen times a second. Problem solved, and with a couple of other pins on the microcontroller there’s room for this project to grow.

Interested in an auto-fire feature for your gaming console? Perhaps this Xbox 360 rapid fire mod will give you some inspiration.

Linux-Fu: Automation For Chrome And The Desktop By Matching Screenshots

June 15, 2020 by 11 Comments

I will be the first to admit it. This is almost not — at least not specifically — a Linux article. The subject? An automation tool for Chrome or Firefox. But before you hit the back button, hear me out. Sure, this Chrome plugin started out as a tool to automatically test web pages and automate repetitive tasks in the browser. However, it can extend that power to all programs on your computer. So, in theory, you can use it to graphically build macros that can interact with desktop applications in surprisingly sophisticated ways. In theory, anyway; there are a few problems.

The program has a few different names. Most documentation says UI Vision RPA, although there are some references to Kantu, which appears to be an older name. RPA is an acronym for Robotic Process Automation, which is an industry buzz word.

Let’s take it for a spin and see what it’s all about.

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Rapid Fire Mod For A Wireless Mouse

August 30, 2014 by 18 Comments

Rapid Fire Wireless Mouse

Sometimes changing your computer mouse can be uncomfortable for a while until you get used to the replacement. It may also take some time to get used to new features or the lack of features the new mouse has. [Jon] bought an awesome wireless mouse that he really likes but it is missing one critical feature: rapid fire for gaming. He previously modded his old wired mouse to have a rapid fire button using a 555 timer. That worked fine as the mouse ran off the USB’s 5 volts, and that’s the voltage the 555 timer needed. The new wireless mouse has a 1.5 volt battery and can not support the 555 timer. What’s a gamer to do?

[Jon] searched around the ‘net but could not find any wireless rapid fire mods. Eventually, he did find a low-voltage variation called the LMC555 and ordered a few for his project. The new wireless mouse was taken apart in order to find out how the mouse buttons work. In this case, the signal pin is pulled low when the mouse button is pushed. Now that it is known how the mouse button works, just a couple of resistors, a capacitor, an NPN transistor and a push button switch are all that are necessary to finish up this mod. When the push button is pressed, the LMC555 timer activates the transistor in order to ground the mouse button signal pin. This happens to the tune of 1236 times a minute! That is a lot of rapid firing.

The few components were soldered up neatly and packed into the limited spare area inside the mouse. A hole drilled in the side of the mouse’s housing holds the new rapid fire push button in an ergonomically pleasing location.

Earlier, we mentioned [Jon] has done this mod before on a wired mouse. He learned about that project here on Hackaday. Check it out if your wired mouse is craving a rapid fire button.

Video after the break…

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555s For Your Mouse And R/C Airplane

February 1, 2011 by 18 Comments

[lenny] decided to build a 555-based auto-firing mouse based on a 555 after seeing a similar PIC-based project we posted earlier. Lenny’s version is self-contained in one mouse without requiring a second mouse to act as the rapid-fire button. It uses only a handful of components, costs less than $5 to build, and doesn’t require any programming.

But then, [wfdudley] shakes things up a bit. He added a 4022 counter IC and some diodes to act as logical “OR” gates in order to create a unique blinking pattern (short-short-long) for the lights on a friend’s RC airplane. While this project involves more components, it’s definitely a trickier problem to solve with a 555 timer IC. We love seeing people choosing simplicity in design over popular off-the-shelf microcontroller frameworks as these two have done.

Don’t forget, the 555 Design Contest is still going strong, and you’ve got the entire month of February to submit your awesome designs. We wanted to highlight two of the more clever 555-based hacks that we’ve had in our backlog for a while, though.

Patching Into An Optical Mouse With A PIC

January 28, 2011 by 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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This Week In Security: Apple Backdoors Curl, Tor’s New Bridge, And GhostRace

March 15, 2024 by 8 Comments

OK, that headline is a bit of a cheap shot. But if you run the curl binary that Apple ships, you’re in for a surprise if you happen to use the --cacert flag. That flag specifies that TLS verification is only to be done using the certificate file specified. That’s useful to solve certificate mysteries, or to make absolutely sure that you’re connecting to the server you expect.

What’s weird here is that on a MacOS, using the Apple provided curl binary, --cacert doesn’t limit the program to the single certificate file. On an Apple system, the verification falls back to the system’s certificate store. This is an intentional choice by Apple, but not one that’s aimed particularly at curl. The real magic is in Apple’s SSL library, which forces the use of the system keychain.

The current state of things is that this option is simply not going to do the right thing in the Apple provided binary. It’s documented with the note that “this option is supported for backward compatibility with other SSL engines, but it should not be set.” It’s an unfortunate situation, and we’re hopeful that a workaround can be found to restore the documented function of this option. Continue reading “This Week In Security: Apple Backdoors Curl, Tor’s New Bridge, And GhostRace” →

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Hackaday Links: October 29, 2023

October 29, 2023 by 22 Comments

“As California goes, so goes the nation.” That adage has been true on and off for the last 100 years or so, and it’s true again now that GM’s Cruise self-driving car unit has halted operations across the United States, just a couple of days after California’s DMV suspended its license to conduct driverless tests on state roadways. The nationwide shutdown of testing was undertaken voluntarily by the company and takes their sore beset self-driving taxi fleet off the road in Phoenix, Houston, Austin, Dallas, and Miami, in addition to the California ban, which seemed to be mainly happening in San Francisco. Cruise’s fleet has suffered all manner of indignities over the last few months, from vandalism to “coning” pranks to even being used as rolling hookup spots, and that’s not to mention all the trouble they caused by brigading to the same address or losing games of chicken with a semi and a firetruck. We’re not sure what to make of all this; despite our somewhat snarky commentary on the company’s woes, we take little pleasure in this development other than to the degree it probably increases roadway safety in the former test cities. We really do want to see self-driving cars succeed, at least for certain use cases, but it seems like this is a case of too much, too soon for the technology we currently have at our disposal.

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