For those of us who keep in mind old sphere mice, they were a great deal like contemporary optical mice except that they needed to be cleaned constantly. having optical mice as a common method of interacting with a computer is a major enhancement over previous eras in computing. With extinction of the sphere mouse, there are an uncountable number of affordable optical mice around now which are simple pickings for contemporary hacking, as well as this newest job from [Vipul] shows off a few of the methods that optical mice can be repurposed by building a digital ruler.

The develop seems straightforward on the surface. As the ruler is passed over a surface the gadget keeps track of precisely exactly how far it has moved, making it an efficient as well as extremely precise ruler. To built it, the optical element of a mouse was scavenged as well as mated directly to a Raspberry Pi Zero W over USB. originally he intended to utilize an ESP32 however might not get the USB interface to work. [Vipul] was then able to compose some software application which can checked out the info from the mouse’s PCB directly as well as equate it into human-readable type where it is displayed on a little screen. The entire gadget is housed in a customized 3D-printed enclosure to wrap whatever up, however the develop doesn’t stop there though. [Vipul] likewise leveraged the Bluetooth performance of the Pi as well as wrote a smartphone app which can be utilized to control the ruler as well.

While the gadget does have some limitations in that it has to make get in touch with with the item being measured across its entire length, there are some situations where we can envision something such as this being incredibly helpful particularly when measuring things that aren’t a straight line. [Vipul] has likewise made all of the code for this job publicly offered for those of us who may have other uses in mind for something like this. We’ve seen optical mice repurposed for all type of things in the past, too, including measuring travel distances in autonomous vehicles.