Optical mouse based scanner

January 7, 2006 | General, Hacking | By: Mark VandeWettering

Courtesy of hack-a-day, a student did something which I thought was rather clever, he disassembled an optical mouse, and hooked the tiny image sensor (18×18 pixels) directly to the parallel port of his computer, and wrote a program to read out the results. I can’t immediately think of what use this would be, but I think it’s a neat thing anyway.