Magic Finger Input Device Is A Camera On Your Finger Tip

October 16, 2012 by Mike Szczys 35 Comments

What if we could do away with mice and just wear a thimble as a control interface? That’s the concept behind Magic Finger. It adds as movement tracking sensor and RGB camera to your fingertip.

Touch screens are great, but what if you want to use any surface as an input? Then you grab the simplest of today’s standard inputs: a computer mouse. But take that one step further and think of the possibilities of using the mouse as a graphic input device in addition to a positional sensor. This concept allows Magic Finger to distinguish between many different materials. It knows the difference between your desk and a piece of paper. Furthermore, it opens the door to data transfer through a code scheme they call a micro matrix. It’s like a super small QR code which is read by the camera in the device.

The concept video found after the break shows off a lot of cool tricks used by the device. Our favorite is the tablet PC controlled by moving your finger on the back side of the device, instead of interrupting your line of sight and leaving fingerprints by touching the screen.

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Making A Nostalgic Apple Mouse Wireless

October 4, 2012 by Mike Szczys 22 Comments

If you’ve got an old mouse sitting around that has that perfect retro look why not start using it again? We’d bet there’s just enough room in there to turn the input device wireless.

The hack does away with everything but the case. The guts from a brand new wireless laser mouse are used as replacements. For the most part this is a simple process of making room for the new board and laying it in place. It involves cutting off a few plastic case nubs, enlarging the hole on the bottom so that the laser has a clear line of sight to the desktop, and hot gluing the thing in place. The button cover had a bit of plastic glued in place so that it lines up correctly with the replacement mouse’s switch.

The only thing that didn’t work out well is the battery situation. The AA cell that the mouse needs was too big for the retrofit so it was swapped with an AAA. These have a lower capacity which means more frequent replacement.

[via Make]

Pan/Tilt Wheel Trainer Ends Up Being A Different Way To Play Quake

September 25, 2012 by Mike Szczys 17 Comments

This is a special controller that [Gary Scott] built to help train camera operators. The pan and tilt controls on high-end movie cameras use wheels to pan and tilt smoothly. This rig can be built rather inexpensively and used to practice following a subject as you would with a camera. This is where the project takes a turn into familiar territory. [Gary] set up a system so that you can play the game Quake using this controller, with your feet doing the rest.

The pan/tilt controller uses two heads from an old VCR. They are mounted above the guts from an old ball-type mouse. A couple of rubber belts connect the heads to the two mouse bars that are normally rotated by the ball. This gives him control of where the Quake game is looking. But he still needed to be able to move, jump, change weapons. and shoot. So he built a second controller for his feet. It uses a CD and some switches as a joystick, and a set of buttons for the other controls. He actually rigged up solenoids to each of those foot switches to physically press keys on a keyboard. You really must see it for yourself. We’ve embedded his set of videos after the break.

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Use Your TV Remote As An HID Mouse

July 19, 2012 by Mike Szczys 17 Comments

[Vinod’s] latest project lets him use a TV remote control as a mouse. It may not sound like much, but he did it with a minimum of hardware and packed in the maximum when it comes to features.

He’s using an ATmega8 to read the remote control signals and provide USB connectivity. With the V-USB stack he enumerates the device as an HID mouse. One note of warning, he used the PID/VID pair from the USBasp programmer project. If you use that programmer you’ll need to uninstall the drivers to get this to work (we think this is only necessary on a Windows box).

The cursor can be moved in eight directions using the number pad on the remote. The numeral five falls in the center of the directional buttons so [Vinod] mapped that to the left click, with the zero key serving as right click. He even included the scroll wheel by using the volume buttons. The firmware supports cursor acceleration. If you hold one direction the cursor will move slowly at first,then pick up speed. Fine adjustments can be made by single clicking the button. Check out his demonstration embedded after the break.

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Controlling A Mouse With Your Voice

June 7, 2012 by Brian Benchoff 25 Comments

It’s entirely possible to use a computer without the aid of a mouse or trackpad. Shift and arrow keys will get you very far, but that is entirely too taxing. [Stephen] came up with a really neat way to control a mouse with your voice, a project that is sure to find its way onto the desktops of those with mobility issues very quickly

The voice controlled mouse works in conjunction with the voice recognition built into OS X, a little AppleScript, and a touch of Python. When the user says, ‘show grid’ a 10 by 10 grid numbered 1 to 100 is displayed on the screen. By saying ‘thirty five,’ the cursor moves to the 35th cell in the grid. From there, the mouse can be controlled by speaking cardinal directions such as South and Northwest.

[Stephen] put up a very clever demo of his Voice Mouse project available after the break. Even though he did have a little difficulty with his mac recognizing a few of his spoken commands its light years ahead of trying to navigate the web with just shift and arrow keys.

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Retrotechtacular: The Blit Has Given Me Access To The Power Of Multiprogramming!

May 4, 2012 by Mike Szczys 16 Comments

We normally try to be descriptive with our titles. But when that statement pops out of the narration with notable excitement it made us chuckle. This installment of Retrotechtacular is a promotional video for the Blit. It’s a graphics-based hardware terminal for Unix systems. It’s biggest boast is the ability to run (and display on screen) several different programs at once — an activity called multiprogramming. But there is also the “digitizing mouse”. On board is a 68000 microcprocessor 256k of RAM (they call it a quarter meg), and connects via RS232. The screen is 800 by 1024; that’s right, it’s a portrait orientation.

Notable in this episode are some classic eyeglass frames, and rad synthesizer sounds for scene transitions. Whatever happened to videography technique that uses a dimwitted companion to ask that all-knowing narrator stupid questions?

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Foot-controlled Mouse Keeps Your Hands On The Keyboard

March 7, 2012 by Mike Szczys 27 Comments

A bit of mechanical ingenuity makes building this foot-controlled mouse into a fun project. It consists of a platform which hosts one pedal for each foot. The right foot controls the movement of the cursor, and the left is responsible for the buttons.

The guts of a wireless mouse do most of the electrical work for this hack. You can see that the optical sensor is mounted on the front of the right foot pedal. A ball bearing combined with a hinge provides motion on two axes. This moves the sensor past a piece of curved foam made by covering a ball with plastic wrap then spraying foam insulation around it. The pedal on the left has four buttons actuated by moving the toes down, up, left, or right. There’s a centering mechanism for this pedal which uses a rubber band

One thing we wonder about here is whether there is a need to lift and re-center the mouse/cursor? There is also no scroll wheel. But those issues are just waiting for someone to pick up the project and make their own improvements.