CHAPTER 1
INTRODUCTION
Every day of your computing life, you reach out for the mouse whenever you want to move the cursor or activate something. The mouse senses your motion and your clicks and sends them to the computer so it can respond appropriately. An ordinary mouse detects motion in the X and Y plane and acts as a two dimensional controller. It is not well suited for people to use in a 3D graphics environment. Space Mouse is a professional 3D controller specifically designed for manipulating objects in a 3D environment. It permits the simultaneous control of all six degrees of freedom - translation rotation or a combination. . The device serves as an intuitive man-machine interface
The predecessor of the spacemouse was the DLR controller ball. Spacemouse has its origins in the late seventies when the DLR (German Aerospace Research Establishment) started research in its robotics and system dynamics division on devices with six degrees of freedom (6 dof) for controlling robot grippers in Cartesian space. The basic principle behind its construction is mechatronics engineering and the multisensory concept. The spacemouse has different modes of operation in which it can also be used as a two-dimensional mouse.
CHAPTER 2
How does computer mouse work?
Mice first broke onto the public stage with the introduction of the Apple Macintosh in 1984, and since then they have helped to completely redefine the way we use computers. Every day of your computing life, you reach out for your mouse whenever you want to move your cursor or activate something. Your mouse senses your motion and your clicks and sends them to the computer so it can respond appropriately
2.1 Inside a Mouse
The main goal of any mouse is to translate the motion of your hand into signals that the computer can use. Almost all mice today do the translation using five components:
Fig.1 The guts of a mouse
1. A ball inside the mouse touches the desktop and rolls when the mouse moves.
Fig 2
The underside of the mouse's logic board: The exposed portion of the ball touches the desktop.
2. Two rollers inside the mouse touch the ball. One of the rollers is oriented so that it detects motion in the X direction, and the other is oriented 90 degrees to the first roller so it detects motion in the Y direction. When the ball rotates, one or both of these rollers rotate as well. The following image shows the two white rollers on this mouse:
Fig.3 The rollers that touch the ball and detect X and Y motion
3. The rollers each connect to a shaft, and the shaft spins a disk with holes in it. When a roller rolls, its shaft and disk spin. The following image shows the disk:
Fig.4 A typical optical encoding disk: This disk has 36 holes around its outer edge.
4. On either side of the disk there is an infrared LED and an infrared sensor. The holes in the disk break the beam of light coming from the LED so that the infrared sensor sees pulses of light. The rate of the pulsing is directly related to the speed of the mouse and the distance it travels.
Fig.5 A close-up of one of the optical encoders that track mouse motion: There is an infrared LED (clear) on one side of the disk and an infrared sensor (red) on the other.
5. An on-board processor chip reads the pulses from the infrared sensors and turns them into binary data that the computer can understand. The chip sends the binary data to the computer through the mouse's cord.
(Download Full Report And Abstract)
