hacking computer Mice

[Trumpkin]

This may be a stupid question but is there any way you could hack a computer mouse's encoder so you could use the mouse as a back wheel or something? 

[Steve Joblin]

like this?  http://imakeprojects.com/Projects/seeing-eye-mouse/

[Trumpkin]

Yeah, I think thats what I'm looking for. Thanks!

[Trumpkin]

Does anybody know if you can connect the mouse to a microcontroller without an extra board?

[robonoob]

Does anybody know if you can connect the mouse to a microcontroller without an extra board?

yea i would be interested in the same thing... i want to attach a mouse to my arduino board to read some infromation from it

[krich]

You can.  Now, having said that, it's not like just plugging into the USB/PS2 port.

The heart of the optical mouse is an ADNS chip from Agilent/Avago.  Aside from a couple chips from ST Micro, Avago is the only manufacturer of this kind of chip.

To keep it simple, the interface between your microcontroller and the ADNS chip (depending on the model) is either a dual Quadrature interface or a simplex/duplex serial interface, or both.  With the quadrature interface, you can get the DeltaX and DeltaY values.  With the serial interface, you can pull position information, framegrabs from the sensor itself, monitor surface quality, and more.

Here's the ADNS-2610 datasheet.

I'm working on building my own carrier board for a similar chip (ADNS-2051) with a customized optical lens system so that I can place the sensor more than 2.5mm from the ground and use it instead of wheel encoders for positioning.

[rargus]

Have a look at http://www.awce.com/pak11.htm They also have a board with this IC on it and a similar one for the keyboard. I have the keyboard one and you can force it to read a mouse, although it looks like the newer chip is easier to use with a mouse.