Six axis controller constructed from three mice
We've seen some rather interesting mouse mods in our day, with some admittedly being more worthwhile than others, but an engineering mind over at LushProjects has definitely raised the bar quite a bit with his latest. Dubbed Three Blind Mice, the project consisted of two waves and more work than he ever expected, but yielded a very successful six axis (not that SIXAXIS) controller to use in 3D graphics applications such as VVVV. After realizing that panning and shuffling around camera angles with a 2D mouse / keyboard tandem was wasting entirely too much of his life, he embarked on a journey to "run three threads round three rollers from old mechanical mice." After realizing that Windows wasn't exactly keen on making things easy, he diverted his efforts into connecting the mice to the PC via an AVR microcontroller connected to the serial bus. By adding weights to an "opto-mechanical mouse with two horizontal rollers," as well as mounting a shaft and shaft-encoder through the middle of a mouse, he was able to realize all axes and utilize "mind bending math" to translate the mice data to on-screen orientation. While the full skinny is entirely too complex to be covered here, be sure to hit the link if this stuff suits your fancy, but make sure you've got oodles of time before even considering duplicating this one at home.
[Thanks, Harry]
