Topic awaiting preservation: Is there anyway to see out of an optical mouse? (Page 1 of 1)

Ok maybe this is just one of those geeky things that I or anyone else would have no purpose at all for, but...

Is there anyway to see what an optical mouse sees out of that little camera on the bottom of it?



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LOL, I dunno, but I definetly concur that it would be cool! It would make a fun desktop too.

The mousepad?

I'm pretty sure the calculations done to figure out how much the mouse has moved are done inside the mouse, so the images aren't sent to the computer. So to access the images you would probably have to open up the mouse and 're-program' the hardware in some way.

But it would be fun if it was a simple way of doing it

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It depends pretty much on the kind of surface the mouse is being moved over. If it's a plain gray mousepad, no much fun. If it's a photo of some porn star, that'll be interesting. Or even some live surface...

I don't know much about how it works, but I don't think it's a "camera" in the sense that you can get an 800x600 picture out of it. I don't think it has any *resolution* - it's just one laser whose reflections are analyzed. If you can get *any* picture out of it, I doubt it'll have a resolution higher than 3x3.

Now keep in mind that this is just speculation, but...Have you ever looked at an "optical mousepad." They are a bunch of alterations between two distint colors. Like white-black, or grey-light grey. The camera in the mouse must sense color variation and then move the pointer based on that. BUT. Why make the mousepads like that, I think that since they can make a cheap optical mousepad by just alternating colors like that, that the cameras resolution must be just 5*5 or something.

Actually the optical mice do take real pictures, and I would imagine the resolution is be significantly higher than (5 x 5) because they use the same technology that is now used in certain digital cameras (CMOS). The red light isn?t a laser it's just a LED used to illuminate the working surface to aid in displacement analyses. They actually have some substantial hardware; I think they take something like 1,400 pictures every second. But no, there's no practical way to extract the images because all of the processing takes place inside mouse; all that gets sent to the box is raw coordinates.

All i know is that red led sure is dang skippy bright. yeowch.

You would probably have to aim it at the sun if you wanted to take a picture... i dunno.

Actually that LED is a laser, just not in the traditional sense. It does have a focus point, but it's more wide spread than a standard laser, and it does use the excitement of electrons to prodce photons on fall off that are all of the one wavelength. Hence the reason it's full name is a Laser Light Emitting Diode. They use the same things in Laser Light Pointers.

stumbled across this site the other day....and when i saw this thread i thought of this site

How Stuff Works
the explaination for an optical mouse is towards the bottom.

also found this for how they work: Tech Explained

pretty groovy...as it's just one of those things i don't question...it just is

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