A Guy Made a Computer Mouse That is Also a Functional Laptop (vice.com) 64
A YouTube user who goes by Electronic Grenade has designed a computer mouse that is also a functional laptop. From a report: As detailed in a video published on Sunday, the computer mouse computer consists of a 3d-printed mouse, a Raspberry Pi microcontroller, a small keyboard, and a handful of components that were taken from a normal computer mouse. "Even though the screen is attached to the mouse, the sensitivity of the mouse makes it not that hard to follow along with what is happening on the screen," Electronic Grenade said in the video. Nevertheless, the mouse does have its faults. According to Electronic Grenade, a few resource intensive applications will occasionally cause the mouse computer to crash.
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What do you think Linux is never prone to crashing? Especially with odd display settings?
X-Windows (X11r6, X.Org....) has always been Linux's weak spot in terms of stability.
Out of all the time Linux had crashed on Me. It was some version of X Windows which was the problem.
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Re:A Raspberry Pi is more than a microcontroller (Score:4, Funny)
I'm assuming there's a RP Zero in there and its a single board computer that runs linux. Strange that it crashes though, it might need a heatsink and some cooling vents.
Yo dawg, I heard you like computing, so I hooked a computer up to your computer.
This would have been really cool... (Score:4, Insightful)
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Actually, you could just use the smartphone's camera as the sensor in cheap optical mice are basically a low resolution digicam. Given you could use the Bluetooth radio to act like a Bluetooth mouse, and the touch screen to act like a set of buttons I don't actually see any reason why a smartphone couldn't be a very expensive, horribly overpowered wireless mouse with terrible battery life.
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Back in the day, when Blackberries had those little track ball things, you could pair them with your desktop and use them as mice/trackballs.
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Sexy! (Score:1)
Can you imagine a Beowulf cluster of these?
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Just returned to the site after a 6 year hiatus.
Glad to see the jokes haven't changed.
Clever but pointless (Score:4, Interesting)
Old quote. Just because you are different doesn't mean you are useful.
I'll grant that this is clever but it's hard to see any practical value in it. Obviously done for entertainment. This is what annoys me about a lot of so called Maker culture. They spend huge brainpower on things that are obviously useless. Nothing wrong with entertaining yourself building something just because you can but maybe take a tiny bit of effort to actually solve a real problem while you are at it? This is like the old calculator watches from my youth - got you geek cred to wear one but they were utterly useless to actually try and use.
Clever fun hacks don't have to be useless (Score:3)
Because clever but pointless hacks are fun?
Why do clever fun hacks have to be pointless? There are plenty of clever and fun things you can do that solve real problems. They don't have to be world changing but they don't have to be dumpster food either.
And they build skills that eventually can be used to solve "real" problems.
You can build skills to solve "real" problems by working on those real problems.
Re: Clever fun hacks don't have to be useless (Score:1)
Its pointless for you maybe, but if it was a learning experience for him then it wasnt so pointless now, was it. Youre too focused on the product and not the process.
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A mouse is a pointing device (Score:2)
Given that mice and trackpads are the two major types of pointing devices, technically this isn't point-less.
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Me, I'm just hoping I can figure out how to disable the wifi when we get our new washer and dryer that the wife ordered that I didn't find out were 'smart' appliances until it was too late.
A hammer. Or change the key after your silly wife happily gave it said encryption key. Then hammer her.
Smart devices are the worst things ever invented.
It would be fine if they, you know, actually functioned reliably, but literally every single one of them I have ever used have been SHIT. They are slow, unresponsive messes.
When I press a button on a TV remote control, I expect a lag of no more than 0.5 seconds, not fucking 3 , or sometimes WORSE, and sometimes outright not even responding until a hard re
Re:Clever but pointless (Score:5, Insightful)
They spend huge brainpower on things that are obviously useless.
99.99% of the work done by students in schools is also "useless" by your definition, since it only replicates efforts that had already been done previously. 99.99% of the world's art is also "obviously useless" in that it doesn't do anything.
However, students still benefit from doing the "useless" work, because in the process of completing their projects and assignments, they (hopefully) learn more about the subject at hand, and get better at doing that sort of work.
In the same way, designing and building this project helps the creator get hands-on experience designing and building this sort of device, and helps him (and others) explore the possibilities related to it. All the mistakes he made while completing this project are mistakes he'll know not to make in future projects.
Perhaps he puts this on his resume, and as a result gets a better job offer than he would have otherwise. Perhaps someone else watches the video and says "well that's not useful, but now that I've seen what is possible using today's technology, I have an idea -- what if I did something similar except apply it to this other use-case; now that would be useful!" -- and thus a new technology is born, which may or may not be The Next Big Thing. If nobody scratched their itch, but rather limited themselves only to "products that fill an obvious need", then a lot of people simply wouldn't do any extracurricular projects at all, and we'd never see many of the new ideas that nobody had yet realized would be useful. As Henry Ford allegedly once said, "if I'd asked people what they wanted, they would have said a faster horse".
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A computer in a mouse is pretty cool.
Lame. A server inside a RJ45 connector was better (Score:5, Interesting)
And that was almost 14 years ago:
https://hardware.slashdot.org/... [slashdot.org]
Functional Computer (Score:3)
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Functional computer maybe. Not sure I would call it a laptop.
To me it would have made more sense to have the guts of the computer in the mouse, but with a separate foldable keyboard/screen that folds up into something the size of a phone. With the guts in the mouse itself the keyboard/screen could be extremely thin and lightweight but everything would be usable at the same time, and you would actually be able to see what's on the screen.
Ah an old school Slashdot Article. (Score:5, Insightful)
This is the type of Slashdot Article that we got back in the late 1990's. About some crazy guy trying to make something just because he could. Never mind it was practical, or profitable. Just a cool thing to do. Just like the Potato Powered Web Server [slashdot.org] back in the year 2000. Completely pointless, but just a cool idea.
And you know what, just because the idea is silly, there were probably a lot of good learning events taken place in such an exercise.
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I miss CmdrTaco so much ;(
All these 7 digit youngins don't even know who the Great Malda is :-(
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Like PicoTux!!! https://hardware.slashdot.org/... [slashdot.org]
And it's a toaster. (Score:3, Funny)
I bet it runs Emacs.
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That's a great OS, but what text editor does it come with?
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Vi won. Get over it.
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Vimacs, I merged them to piss off both sides.
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Shit, the Interwebs beat me at my game: https://www.vim.org/scripts/sc... [vim.org]
Very Cool Hack - Could be start of something big (Score:2)
Nicely done and I was surprised at how usable it was (for the most part) - the keyboard is what I would consider the biggest kludge and I would think there would be better ways to implement it.
The big question is what types of applications would this be good for? I could see it being good for point of sales as well as teaching. Adding a bar code scanner would probably be a prerequisite though. While it wouldn't be that usable for most people, I suspect that there are some situations where a computer/inpu
Why? (Score:2)
This is simply a case mod for a raspberry pi. This should be on indestructible or hack-a-day, but not here. This also is the most useless thing I have ever seen. Who wants to look at a screen when moving it?
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Sorry, Destructables.
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The MyTouch 3G had a trackball. By the way, can this even be called a mouse as it is not a peripheral but literally the entire computer?
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Instructables*
Just cause it's do-able doesn't make it useful (Score:2)
This is absolutely useless. In video he mentions noone has ever made such a thing... Well it's because it's absolutely useless and absurd. Instead of building crap use that brainpower to build something useful.
Disappointed .... (Score:2)
Before I read the article, I thought this might be about someone who fit all the brains of a PC into a regular wireless mouse. That could have been pretty cool, if you just paired a wireless Bluetooth keyboard to it and the only cord coming from it was a combo video connection to a display and power for the mouse/computer itself.
It would limit you to your external display choices, but you could probably make the only mouse cord a Thunderbolt or USB-C cable that could provide video signal to the display and