Our editors have compiled a list of seven computer mice you can’t buy, or at least anytime soon. If we happened to miss any, please leave us a comment. “Continue reading” for the list.
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]
Glove Mouse
A group of college students — Brian Eng, Andy Homar, Matteo Mannino, and Saad Sam — designed and created this nifty PowerGlove-like mouse for Purdue ECE477.
This is not merely a hack job like other glove mice found on youtube that simply use an off the shelf gyration mouse. Custom PCB’s for the base station and glove module were designed by us and fabricated. Everything was built from the ground up
LCD Mouse
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
[Source]
Nokia 6230i Bluetooth Mouse
Pyrofer‘s nifty “Nokia 6230i Bluetooth Mouse” functions as both a computer input device and cell phone.
After giving up on the idea of a proper mouse HID I used the bluetooth to just link the phone as normal and send the data over the Nokia driver to a special driver on the PC again, this isnt as convenient as the original plan as it needs software on the PC as well as the phone
[Source]
Stone Mouse
File this under: “Strange Computer Mice” A Russian designer has created the world’s first functional computer mouse made of stone.
…looks like the stone parts are polished/cut and glued to the mouse. The beige scroll wheel and cable ruin the appeal slightly…
Soap – The Mid-Air Mouse
Soap puts a new twist on tradional optical mice by adding mid-air functionality. This technology is “based on hardware found in a mouse” and “consists of an optical sensor device moving freely inside a hull made of fabric.”
As the user applies pressure from the outside, the optical sensor moves independent from the hull. The optical sensor perceives this relative motion and reports it as position input. Soap offers many of the benefits of optical mice, such as high-accuracy sensing
3D Wireless Mouse
Students at UC Santa Cruz have developed “FRE3SPACE“, a wireless mouse “that could operate in three dimensions.”
In other words, while holding the mouse in the air you could move your arm left or right, up and down, towards and away, in relation to your computer. Our system would detect the 3D position of the mouse and give this information to the PC to be used by other applications
[Source]
