tech e blog

5. NES Controller Optical Mouse

Most optical mice are boring, not this one. To make your own, you'll need an NES controller, optical mouse, dremel tool, lots of glue, soldering gun, and four-five hours. Video here.

I considered putting the scroll wheel in because i really prefer my mice with them. It could be done fairly easily but i wanted to keep the form factor. The wheel would have come out right between the red buttons and the "Nintendo" logo. Using the controller you put your palm over the 4 way control and your index finger on the A button

4. PowerGlove Mouse

Austin Weber decided to make his own PowerGlove mouse hack -- based on ZeroSign's original design . This new version features in game controls that are mapped to the thumb (forward motion), pointer finger (trigger), and arm (camera view).

In addition to cleaning up all the wires and using smaller circuitry components he also has a killer demo of the glove with Unreal Tournament.

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3. The Minty Optical Mouse

To make your own "Minty Mouse", you'll need one Altoids tin, an optical mouse, dremel tools, epoxy glue, a mini-hack saw, and around 4 hours of free time. [Source]

2. NES Zapper Mouse

For ZeroSign's latest mod, he dissected a gyration mouse and wired it to an NES Zapper.

"This is a very easy hack and will give you a fully functional (yet ugly) motion sensing mouse gun fashioned out of the old-school NES Zapper - a must have for any hipster kid from the 80’s."

[Source]

1. LCD Mouse Mod

Modder Jani 'Japala' Pönkkö added an LCD display (Nokia 6610) into a Logitech G5 laser mouse. Full instructions here.

The controller requires adding three more wires to the mouse. These are connected to a parallel port. The screen can only show about 1 frame per second, but that is fast enough for general statistics or showing photos. It’s a really clean build. A clever trick was using a piece of plastic from the blister pack to cover the screen since it was already the same shape as the mouse

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Honorable Mention - SNES Mouse on a PC

Raphael built a custom adapter -- same ones used to connect SNES gamepads -- for an old SNES Mario Paint mouse. It's compatible with all Linux systems.

"Why do that? Here are a few good reasons: (at least, those are good reasons for me!) The ability to play Mario-Paint with the real original mouse. (Authenticity). The possibility of using your good old mouse which reminds you a lot of good childhood memoires to do real work. (Nostalgia). Because you can, and it's cool. (Cool factor)"

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