Make an Optical Mouse Scanner
So you just bought one of those hi-tech looking optical mouse…yeah, those that don’t have heavy and nasty roller/tracker balls in them. That doesn’t only mean that from now on it would only be smooth sailing for you in the days ahead. The Optical Mouse can be as fragile as any other PC-accessories and might drop out of service any time soon. But that doesn’t mean you have to throw it out like any other junk…You can recycle its vital parts and make a home-made “SCANNER”! (say Aieeee) . The scanned documents might look crappish, but hey where on earth can you get a scanner (even one made with your own hands) for 8-9$ ? Jeroen has an excellent page on how to turn one of those optical mice into a made-shift scanner. Let me explain the main excerpts in short.
Basically the main things are, you take an optical mouse apart, rewire the circuits here and there, mod the parallel port connections, write some lines of modulation codes and apply it all together in order to make the whole “Scanner” thingy. Sounds simple? Well, it isn’t as simple as saying , ” Ali G is in the hISS house”. Here are the basic steps:
Read the actual page so that the whole “Modding of the OP mouse” becomes crystal clear to you. All credit goes to this somewhat little named guy called “Jeroen”, hope his hacks will entertain us even more in the days to come.
Useful links:
* Actual article
* Mouse-Eye soft made in VBasic
* A needed datasheet
* Second image in courtesy of Hack-a-day.
FYI, I bought my memorex flatbed USB scanner for $7.
Works a lot better that this ….
Then, there is some guy who used old scanners to build an equally crappy digital camera, and was slashdotted. Not too many people seemed impressed …
Comment by Ragib — February 7, 2006 @ 3:18 pm
Yeah…totally. I don’t ever plan on making this hack “A Novel truth”, I’d rather buy a scanner than to make a crappy one like this.
But still its a great hack indeed dontcha think?
Comment by Naser — February 7, 2006 @ 3:28 pm