I've been using mechanical ball mice as motor encoders for years. Inside every one is a glorious pair of little pie-slice wheels and some phototransistor gates.
I'm kind of bummed the they are getting hard to find as all mice everywhere become direct optical sensor mice.
That's really interesting. I was really surprised by how inexpensive but high quality the logic analyzer was. Does anyone know of an inexpensive oscilloscope that is similar to that?
It has some limitations of course but its open source and I'm in the process of building a USB analyzer with it.
As for scopes the Rigol ones are quite popular, and with a logic "analyzer" (if you are an EE they aren't really logic analyzers, they are more like channels in a binary oscilloscope) I've got a Rigol scope as well but its not nearly as reliable or accurate as the Tek2024 which is my 'goto' scope.
A number of folks make cheap USB attached scopes which run a program on a PC for the UX, which is nice but I've got one that came from a company now gone that only runs on Windows 98 (or ME if it matters). And no documents on how to make it anything else. Sad really.
That tek scope looks like a great scope but it's also an order of magnitude more expensive than the rigol cheap one. I was thinking more for the hobbyist and not for someone who needs it for work and can shell out 3k for a scope. I guess I could if I wanted to but I was hoping there was something like that logic analyzer that was an order of magnitude cheaper than all the other ones but still excellent build quality.
This sounds suspiciously like what one of my friends did about twelve years ago for our freshman engineering project. Granted I believe these mice were more like $50 back then. See the 21 Aug comment here as proof that I'm not hallucinating: http://news.lugnet.com/robotics/handyboard/?n=*8563,-100&...
In fact people have used more precise laser mice? (mouse?) lol