YouTuber Doutor Volt has repurposed an optical mouse to create a camera (h/t Hackaday). The project mainly involved the optical sensor of the mouse, a third-party controller, some software tweaks, and a bit of 3D printing to neatly house a Raspberry Pi wide-angle lens in place of the prism. While we commend the good Doctor for the successful project, he was humble enough to admit that the camera’s images are barely recognizable.
In the beginning of the video, Doctor Volt dissects a very old Logitech mouse. We saw that the optical sensor used by this geriatric rodent was the ADNS 2610 manufactured by Agilent in 2004. Further investigations revealed that this sensor features an array of 18×18 photodiodes. In the mouse, they would be mounted behind a lens and above a prism that directs the LED light onto the mouse surface. The project proposed that this ADNS 2610 sensor would be the heart of the mouse camera.
To create a cool mouse-camera solution, the YouTuber decided to add an ESP32-S3 chip to act as the microcontroller for the experimental device. Doctor Volt discussed the techniques he used to obtain meaningful data from the repurposed mouse sensor through the ESP32-S3. You can see in the video that it required some desoldering and he also had to tinker with the software. The software solution wasn’t entirely new, as Doctor Volt recycled a user interface he had previously created to display images from a ‘Blu-ray microscope’ project he had worked on.
With the hardware and software in place, we see the first evidence of the mouse camera coming to life, as the good Doctor decides to demonstrate the mouse ‘scanning’ a 20 euro note in real time. As the mouse is moved, the UI preview window shows the 18×18 pixels (324 pixels) that the mouse sensor is seeing. We do not know the color depth of the sensor and the dynamic range seems weak. The YouTuber admits that the close-up image and its resolution do not provide meaningful images at this stage. However, you could recognize some of the small European stars and equally intricate details when they were carefully scanned with the mouse.
As the YouTuber was satisfied with the progress thus far, he wanted to finalize the transformation of the mouse into the camera. A wide-angle lens, made for a Raspberry Pi camera, was selected to bring the wider world to the mouse sensor.
Turning and tilting the lens towards himself, we could see a pixelated representation of Doctor Volt. It wasn’t the sharpest image, with low contrast and low pixel density, but there was certainly a human head moving. Doctor Volt reflected that he may have become “the first person filmed by a mouse sensor”. It turned out that the mouse camera could operate at around 3fps without errors of any kind.
Concluding the project, the YouTuber acquired some 3D printed parts to securely and neatly mount the Raspberry Pi lens. The result was a bit ugly, but we don’t have other mouse cameras to compare it to. It would be interesting to know if modern optical mice would have more capable sensors for “mouseography”. A quick look at various mouse sensor datasheets seemed to suggest that photodiode array specifications are not readily shared.