PiBits/MouseScan

           Raspberry Pi and optical mouse ==> hand held scanner

This project emulates one you can find here:

http://spritesmods.com/?art=mouseeye

which converts a cheap optical mouse in to a hand held scanner.

It is very crude - for my mouse the scanner is 16x16 pixels and covers
an area less that 1mm square, so you can imagine how hard it is to
get an accurate and complete image.

You could improve things by using a better quality mouse, I think, because
this real cheap one tends to forget to report movement every now and then.
Also, if you were in to image processing you could stitch the 16x16 pixel
images together much more accurately than by relying solely on the movement
reported by the mouse itself.

Anyway I can across a link to the spritemod site and fancied giving a
go.  If you want to try, then go to the spritemod site for the details
of how to connect to the mouse sensor.  My mouse has an A2030 sensor
which has the same interface as the ones mentioned on the spritemods
page.


Richard Hirst, January 2013