there's all sorts of trouble you can get up to. what kind of kit you got laying around?
making a quiver out of the leather from a old couch i "skinned" years ago. currently stretching it to remove any wrinkles before i cut it. going to stretch and clamp it to a piece of scrap wood then drill holes for the paracord then cut out the pieces with a circular saw, and sew it all together. eventually going to start making arrows when i get a lathe. will consider making my own bows from scratch when i have a place that i can leave a few pieces of yew for years at a time and not worry about it or need the space.
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Shoot, you could always build yourself some quality speakers or make some IoT free home automation gear, sky's the limit
It has a wifi chip so the pc isn't involved.
It's continuous rotation. It uses an encoder wheel with optical sensors to get the rotation.
At some point I want to make my own mouse but I haven't a clue on where to begin with the electronics.
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garbage to brittle/flimsy garbage isn't exactly an upgrade.
It's still a cool project though.
ball mouse would be pretty simple. afaik they're just like 3 rotary encoders, 3 tac switches and some generic discrete logic.
I would want it to be new kit. So, either a laser or an optical sensor. I also don't want to just "re-shell" an old mouse. Think high level prototype that is production ready. It would just use generic usb drivers so that you could plug it in to any system. I would also like to have it be wireless with the option of plugging it in to charge and transmit data.
Little more ambitious, but you could also try to build one of those fancy arm SoC ones, and make open source firmware for it so that people would have a reason to buy your board if you decided to spool it up later.
SoC Arm sounds pretty heavy for something that only needs to handle where the mouse is in 2d space and handle input from 5 buttons. I am not shooting that down, but I am a little sceptical.
that's what all the gamer meme mouse platforms are using these days. you could probably do it much more cleanly with a decent micro platform, but that would break with industry "standards." The idea would be to make like, the buffalo III of mouse boards, that makers would buy up by the dozens.
I don't want to make a platform. I want to make a mouse.
Yeah, and thats cool and all. I was just spit-balling. You never know when shooting the shit can lead to inspiration in someone more talented/motivated :)
I love it! Brainstorming is awesome. However, I am not talented in this area. Nor am I particularly motivated at this point in time. It is very simple: I have spent a fortune on high end mice over the years and not one of them checked all the boxes. I am annoyed with this.
Any recommendations on SoC Arm boards?
well, you're gonna want something with at least USB device, a couple of 16 bit adc channels, decent gpio connectivity, and enough memory wiggle room for generic class compliant driver interfacing + customizations. can't really give you a specific dev board, as I've never build a mouse fron scratch, but a good place to start might be to see what roccat and others are running in their mice (I say roccat because they do open source drivers, so you could get away with a low effort clone) you may be able to get free/cheap samples from atmel, and they have literally hundreds of models that fit the bill.
This is what I am after. Specific companies/catalogs that list components I would need.
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you're also gonna need a laser sensor, and whatever driver circuitry those require, a rotary encoder for the mouse wheel, tac switches for the buttons/wheel (though it'd be interesting to see if you could get away with arcade switches/cherry/bucking springs in a mouse) teflon for the bearing surface, and something to make the chassis with.
if you want to get the bare minimum of MCU development down, maybe look at something like the
it's dirt cheap and it'll let you get a feel for things
inb4 someone recommends you shove an entire raspberry pi or *duino+23 shields into a mouse
If this thread is for electronics only then please feel free to ignore this post.
Was looking for a laptop stand a while ago but other than the expensive name-brand ones non fit my expectations.
So I "built" a cheap one from wood and other stuff I had laying around.
Version 1. Added some stoppers made from small metal elbows, screws and rubber washers. Gave that to my mother.
Version 2.
Kinda the same with my headphone hanger. Glued a bunch of small wood pieces together, shaped them with a rasp, file and sandpaper, put some felt on it with hotglue and mounted them with magnets from discarded HDDs.
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