Who in childhood did not dream of laser? Some men still dream. Conventional laser pointers with low power are no longer relevant for a long time, since their power leaves much to be desired. There are 2 options left: buy an expensive laser or make it at home using improvised materials.
There are the following methods for making a laser yourself:
- From an old or broken DVD drive
- From a computer mouse and flashlight
- From a kit of parts purchased at an electronics store
How to make a laser at home from an old oneDVDdrive
How to make a laser from a computer mouse
The power of a laser made from a computer mouse will be much less than the power of a laser made using the previous method. The manufacturing procedure is not very different.
- First, find an old or unwanted mouse with a visible laser of any color. Mice with an invisible glow are not suitable for obvious reasons.
- Next, carefully disassemble it. Inside you will notice a laser that will have to be soldered using a soldering iron.
- Now repeat steps 3-5 from the instructions above. The difference between such lasers, we repeat, is only in power.
Nowadays, even from a computer mouse you can make original things. Many fans of fakes have long figured out how to use a non-working mouse.
Should you throw away your old computer mouse?
Sometimes a computer mouse becomes unusable, sometimes you have to replace an outdated model with a more modern one because of convenience. Often in this case, the appearance and contents remain in good condition. If you don’t want to throw away your old computer parts, you can give them a new life by using them to create interesting things.
What can be made from a computer mouse: ideas
External and internal parts from the old device will be useful for creating the following original things.
Robot
An unnecessary ball mouse will become a light-sensitive robot. To do this, the parts are disassembled, and the switches and infrared emitter are left for operation. The body must be freed from unnecessary parts and protrusions, and wheels must be attached, wrapped in three layers of rubber tape. Next, you will need a relay, which must be installed inside the case, connect the necessary contacts and solder the wiring. To operate, the robot will also need a small microcircuit; it must be placed inside the case. It remains to make two holes for the eyes and one for the LED lamp in the front and one hole for the toggle switch in the back. Contacts are attached to the right and left motors, eyes and battery are connected. The robot is turned on using a toggle switch.
Flashlight
By inserting an LED inside the housing, you can get a small flashlight. Using the same method, you can make a small table stand or lamp. A stand is attached to the place where the wire is connected, and a lighting lamp can be installed in the place of the ball.
Important! Do not use incandescent lamps as lighting. When they heat up, they can damage the plastic from which the mouse body is made.
Tachometer
Using a board from an old mouse, you can create a tachometer. Transistors and an LED board element will come in handy. A resistor is soldered into the free hole of the controller, and a contact from the phototransistor is connected to the board connector. All that remains is to connect the tachometer through the connector to the computer. The resulting device counts rotation pulses per second and displays the data on the monitor.
Winder
A hole is drilled in the upper part of the body into which an adapter with a convenient attachment is placed. Such a winder will be mechanical and will rotate due to the movement of the adapter.
What can be made from many computer mice
If you have a lot of computer mice, you can use them by making:
Columns
By disassembling the plastic case and placing a small speaker there, you can get audio speakers. To do this, you need to unscrew the screw with a screwdriver and divide the device into two parts. Place a custom-sized speaker inside. The wiring must be cleaned, the contacts and their compatibility with the color of the wire must be checked with a tester. Then use hot glue to firmly secure the speaker disk inside and connect both parts of the housing. This portable speaker is suitable for a phone, tablet, player and even a computer.
Advice! If you make a hole in the front of the mouse body, the sound will be more powerful.
Robot RoboCop
This idea will work if you have a lot of broken computer mice at home. From them you can assemble the body and limbs of a complex robot. The role of such a craft can only be decorative, but if you equip the robot with an electrical mechanism, you can get an interesting toy that can move and emit light.
To solve one of the problems, I needed to programmatically obtain and process images of a small area of the paper surface from a very close distance. Having not received decent quality using a regular USB camera and already halfway to the store for an electron microscope, I remembered one of the lectures in which we were told how various devices, including a computer mouse, work.
Preparation and a little theory
I will not go into details of the operating principle of a modern optical mouse; it has been written about in great detail (I recommend reading it for general development).After googling information on this topic and disassembling an old PS/2 Logitech mouse, I saw a picture familiar from articles on the Internet.
Not a very complicated design of “first generation mice”, an optical sensor in the center and a PS/2 interface chip slightly higher. The optical sensor I came across is an analogue of the “popular” models ADNS2610/ADNS2620/PAN3101. I think they and their counterparts were mass produced in the same Chinese factory, with different labels on the output. Documentation for it was very easy to find, even along with various code examples.
The documentation says that this sensor receives an image of a surface measuring 18x18 pixels (400cpi resolution) up to 1500 times per second, stores it and, using image comparison algorithms, calculates the offset in X and Y coordinates relative to the previous position.
Implementation
To “communicate with the sensor” I used the popular computing platform Arduino, and decided to solder directly to the legs of the chip.
We connect 5V and GND to the corresponding Arduino outputs, and the sensor legs SDIO and SCLK to digital pins 8 and 9.
To obtain an offset by coordinates, you need to read the value of the chip register at addresses 0x02 (X) and 0x03 (Y), and to dump the picture you need to first write the value 0x2A at address 0x08, and then read it from there 18x18 times. This will be the last “remembered” value of the image brightness matrix from the optical sensor.
You can see how I implemented this on Arduino here: http://pastebin.com/YpRGbzAS (only ~100 lines of code).
And to receive and display the image, a program was written in Processing.
Result
After a little “finishing” of the program for my project, I was able to receive an image directly from the optical sensor and perform all the necessary calculations on it.
You can notice the texture of the surface (paper) and even individual letters on it. It should be noted that such clear picture quality is obtained due to the fact that the developers of this mouse model added a special glass stand to the design with a small lens directly under the sensor.
If you start to lift the mouse above the surface even a couple of millimeters, the clarity immediately disappears.
If you suddenly want to repeat this at home, to find a mouse with a similar sensor, I recommend looking for old devices with a PS/2 interface.
Conclusion
Although the resulting image is not very large, it was quite enough to solve my problem (barcode scanner). It turned out to be very economical and fast (a mouse for ~100 rubles + Arduino + a couple of days to write the code).I will leave links to materials that were very useful to me for solving this problem. It really wasn’t difficult and was done with great pleasure. Now I'm looking for information about the chips of more expensive models of modern mice to obtain high-quality images with higher resolution. I might even be able to build something like a microscope (the image quality from the current sensor is clearly not suitable for this). Thank you for your attention!
You constantly use a computer mouse (or, to put it “pretentiously”, a mechanical manipulator that converts movement into a control signal), but have you ever thought about what you can do with a computer mouse? It turns out not so little. Select an object or copy it, move or delete, open or close a file or folder, everything and much more can be done with the computer mouse. That's what we'll talk about.
In this lesson we will get acquainted with the computer mouse, learn some of its secrets, and also learn what you can do with the mouse in the browser. You, using the mouse, can select a folder, file or some program and perform some actions, move in the desktop area, open a folder or run a program. You can copy or delete a word or entire text.
Computer mice come in ball, laser, wired and non-wired types. But the principle of operation is the same for everyone. When you move the mouse across the surface of your table, the cursor moves on the monitor screen, duplicating your actions. There are only three main buttons needed to work with a computer mouse. These are the left and right keys and the scroll wheel (scroll). Using a computer mouse and additional keyboard buttons, you can significantly simplify and facilitate many operations on the desktop, when working in programs and in browsers. Let's get acquainted with some tricks of working with the mouse.
The simplest operation that you have probably already had to perform is to select some text. To do this, simply add a vertical slash at the beginning of the text. It is also called in English - pipe(in Russian you can safely pronounce "pipe") To do this, use the left mouse button to click at the beginning of the text and hold down the left mouse button and drag (without releasing the button) to the place where the desired text ends. What to do if the length of the text exceeds the page size? The following combination will help you here. Place the cursor at the beginning of the text, hold down a key on the keyboard, Shift and click the left mouse button, without releasing the key on the keyboard, go to the end of the desired text and press the left key again. All text is selected, you can perform further actions with it.
Copy and paste the text.
You need to transfer part or all of the text to another location or folder. We already know how to highlight text. Now, on the selected text, right-click and in the contextual (drop-down) menu find “copy” and click on this item. All the necessary information is saved in your clipboard (the clipboard, if you don’t go into details, is temporary storage where the files, folders, and text you copied are stored). Now find the place where you need to paste what you copied, right-click on it and select “paste” from the drop-down menu. These operations can be done in another way. Select what you need, then hold down the keyboard keys CTRL+C. Everything has been copied. Select the place where you want to paste what you copied, put a slash (one click with the left mouse button) in the desired place and press CTRL + C. That’s it - the text is pasted.
Let's change the scale.
Sometimes, when you open a website or page, you see that the font is very small. Not everyone, especially older people, has good eyesight and it is difficult for them to read such a font. It turns out that this can be fixed quite simply. To do this, hold down the CTRL key and scroll the mouse wheel forward or backward. The font size will increase or decrease accordingly.
Open link in new tab.
You've already had to work on a page and move to another page or tab without closing the first one. At the same time, you performed the following action: “Click on the link with the right mouse button and in the menu that opens, select - Open page in a new window.” But this whole process can be simplified. Hold down the CTRL key and click on the link. That's it, the link will open in a new window.
Move using the right mouse button.
You already know how to move a folder or shortcut on the desktop. If you don't know, I'll tell you. Hold down the selected object with the left mouse button and, without releasing, move it to the selected location. But it turns out that this operation can be performed using the right button. The principle is the same. Right-click and drag to the desired location. When you release the key, a menu will open where you will be asked about your next actions. Choose what you need.
Select a word or text.
If you need to highlight a word, then just move the mouse cursor over the desired word and double-click the left key. Is it possible to select the desired paragraph in this way? Certainly. Place the cursor at the beginning of the text again and left-click three times. The required paragraph is highlighted, you can perform further actions with it.
Third button.
Most users don't use the third mouse button. Few people know about its capabilities. But nevertheless, she can do something. For example, when you open a browser page and click on the wheel, the cursor will change its appearance to round. Now you can, by moving the cursor in different directions, the movement of the page on the screen will also scroll in all directions, and the further the scroll pointer moves, the faster the page will scroll. Sometimes very convenient when scrolling pages with large text.
These are the little tricks of a computer mouse. We'll stop there. Of course, the topic is much broader than stated, but throughout all subsequent lessons, we will return to this issue.
In the next lesson, we will introduce the concept of keyboard shortcuts. These are combinations of two or more keys that can be pressed to perform tasks that typically require the use of a mouse or other pointing device. Keyboard shortcuts make using your computer easier, saving you time and effort when working with Windows and other programs...
In the meantime, I say goodbye to you. As always, you have questions, reviews and of course comments. If you have not yet subscribed to my news, then welcome!
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