The Future Has Arrived!
I decided that since we don't have flying cars or hover-boards yet, I needed to drop-kick this decade into the FUTURE! Working more and more with computers, my wrist started hurting, and I've been trying to find new ways to interact with a PC (in terms of a mouse) that are less likely to give me some lame repetitive stress injury. So I thought, "Why not take a mouse, and case-mod it to a glove?". Why not indeed.
WARNING
This basically involves taking electronic equipment, soldering on some wires to short switches, and then wearing it!. I make no guarantee that you won't get shocked while doing this. If you try anything like this, be sure to try it sensibly!
The wonderful thing about this mod is that you don't have to do anything terribly fancy in terms
of electronics. Only a bit of soldering and ingenuity are required. You can take a generic mouse
and make a fun little toy out of it!
This project is going to start and end with different mice, but they're
just prototypes anyways. If a mouse is going to be in glove-form, then it
wouldn't be a terrible idea to make it wireless!
This is a Microsoft wireless mouse that came as a keyboard combo. The Keyboard was awesome,
but the mouse chewed through batteries like a lab-rat through cheese.
I flipped it over, removed the screw holding it together and removed the housing.
I ditched the scroll-wheel, I haven't thought of a convenient way to
integrate that into a glove... YET
Typical USB mice (that I have seen) are generally all on one PC board, but this sucker is spaced over 2.
The two boards are only connected by some bridging pins on each side.
I tried to carefully clip them, and then realized my wire-cutters wouldn't
fit to get the last ones. Thats when I very un-carefully cut through them all.
If you try this, I suggest being careful at this point so you do not accidentally break the PC board (hint hint).
My plan was to mount the LED/tracking part on the "bottom/side" of the glove,
and the battery pack on the pack. To keep the useful parts of the original shell,
I decided to just cut it in half so I could keep the tracker-base and the battery pack.
After looking for my hacksaw, I realized I bought a cheap 80-piece hand-tool set at
Harbor-Freight for $10 a while ago.
Using something like this makes the results look MUCH nicer...
(than I could do with a hack-saw anyways). The only problem with an 80-piece tools set is
finding the 1 piece you need... [Time passes]...
Now it's time to solder some longer lead-wires.
If something goes wrong, you can at least feel content in that fact that when machines
rise to overtake humanity, this little beast is going to be right at the forefront.
At this point, once I had all the lead-wires soldered back on, I tested it out. It was getting power,
but not working terribly well. I decided to switch over to an old USB mouse to finish out the prototype.
I think in the future I'll see if I can pick up a smaller wireless mouse with less PCB to break.
The three mouse-buttons in this mouse were 3-pin. I tested it out and found that shorting pins 1,2 or 2,3
registered as a click (but not 1,3). I arbitrarily picked one end, and connected all of these wires to a common lead
(the thumb; the 2 grey and 1 white wires in the pictures below). I then connected a single wire to the middle-pin on the other buttons; index finger got the left-click,
middle finger got the middle-click, and ring finger got the right click (The black, green and red wires, respectively). I use linux, so I use the middle-click
more than the right click, but you can choose whatever configuration you want. I soldered the other ends of the wires to some washers,
and then hot-glued those to the respective finger tips on my glove.
I put the tracking part on the bottom/side of my glove as originally planned (also with a hot-glue gun).
So now all that is left is to plug it in and try it out! One of the most complicated things about this is the
"optical" piece that goes over the led/"mouse eye". It has to be positioned JUST RIGHT to track motion.
Thats where one of the benefits of using the original casing comes in! I was lucky enough to have this one work
with minimal positioning...
You can check out a video of my test run here (hosted on YouTube).
Basically you use the bottom of your "fist" to move the mouse around (which also keeps your wrist straight/aligned!). To click, right click, or middle click you just tap the appropriate fingers together! It may not be a hover-board, but at least it's a step in the right direction. Another goal is to be able to wear something like this and still be able to type. I can do that with this, but it could definitely be improved. I will say, that for as "rough" as this design is, it works surprisingly well. It doesn't take long to get used to, and touching your fingers together is already a fairly natural movement.
FUTURE WORK:
Things I would like to see improved are
- a wireless version
- a thinner glove
- thinner contacts for registering a click (I'm thinking something like what is inside a keyboard).
mark[at]markslaboratory.com