Ever since the world decided to transition from mechanical ball mice to optical mice, we have been blessed with computer pointing devices that don’t need regular cleaning and have much better performance than their ancestors. They do this by using what is essentially a tiny digital camera to monitor changes in motion. As we’ve seen before, it is possible to convert this mechanism into an actual camera, but until now we haven’t seen something like this on a high-performance mouse designed for FPS gaming.
For this project [Ankit] is disassembling the Logitech G402, a popular gaming mouse with up to 4000 dpi. Normally this is processed internally in the mouse to translate movement into cursor motion, but this mouse conveniently has a familiar STM32 processor with an SPI interface already broken out on the PCB that could be quickly connected to in order to gather image data. [Ankit] created a custom USB vendor-specific endpoint and wrote a Linux kernel module to parse the data into a custom GUI program that can display the image captured by the mouse sensor on-screen.
It’s probably best to not attempt this project if you plan to re-use the mouse, as the custom firmware appears to render the mouse useless as an actual mouse. But as a proof-of-concept project this high-performance mouse does work fairly well as a camera, albeit with a very low resolution by modern digital camera standards. It is much improved on older mouse-camera builds we’ve seen, though, thanks to the high performance sensors in gaming mice.
There are programs floating around the internet that let you see the raw image from optical mice. They make interesting random number generators, not to mention text readers. Stitch all the images together, using the position data, add lots of hand waving and you’ve got a scanner.
There used to be ADNS sensors with a simple serial interface that let you access the image data directly. Where’d all those go?
They unilaterally decided to stop selling to the proletariat: https://www.mouser.com/PCN/Avago-5-16-12-Avago%20NID%20announcement%20letter%20May%202012.pdf
We serfs aren’t worthy enough for those toys. They’re only for the big companies to make products out of for use to dutifully consume.
But I saw the EOL notice and bought a half dozen before they pulled the plug anyway, just because.
And they still have the guts to start such a letter with “Dear valued Customer”.
The only way they value their customers is by the amount of money they can export by attempting to create artificial shortages. Just like the USB contortion Corporation where you have to cough up USD5000 with the sole benefit to become the owner of a 16 bit number. (You have to pay extra for the rights to use the USB icon)
The resolution appears to be 32×32; there’s one dead pixel.
This is a cool project. I’m always in awe of someone who figures out how to use somebody else’s serial data stream.
To be fair, it’s in the datasheet, and supported and documented AFAIK by every operating system all the way back to DOS (as INT33). I built a text scanner out of an optical mouse like this in 1995 or so. A 25 MHz ‘486 had no trouble keeping up.
I remember seeing something similar many years ago… Ah, here it is:
https://hackaday.com/2006/01/07/optical-mouse-based-scanner/
Link in article is broken, here is archived version:
http://web.archive.org/web/20060826040012/http://sprite.student.utwente.nl/~jeroen/projects/mouseeye/
Main difference is that he didn’t reuse MCU on mouse, he just connected some wires on sensor and connected to PC.
Where can I see the resulting images?
As many others I used the numerous ADNS chips, salvaged from optical mice. Currently I’m playing with this one:
https://www.tindie.com/products/onehorse/paa3905-optical-flow-camera/
35×35 pixel at moderate supply current with a pretty good frame rate and it comes with a lens for >80mm.
Pixart’s business condcuct is annoying as well, I had to learn the datasheet is hidden behind an NDA,
but there is a well documentated code in GitHub, that even I was able to adapt to my favorite controller.
Peter/DL3PB
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