[NotInControl]

Originally Posted by RyanCahoon

The RoboRIO is reported to run Linux on an Arm processor, so any USB device that has drivers for that platform should be usable. There seems a good chance that this will include mice.

I've heard of mice being used on robots in the past in the same way that follower wheels are currently used on FRC robots. The standard problem with this is many mice can't read linear speeds fast enough to keep up with many FRC robots, though some of the newer gaming mice look like they may be up to the task. For autonomous, where drive speeds are typically kept lower to make the robots more controllable, this would be a much more viable approach.

The data output would presumably be the same as for a standard mouse: X-Y movement coordinates, either as deltas or accumulated measurements.

The 2015 control system does run Linux, however it is a custom RT Embedded Linux produced by NI and it is headless (No desktop graphic environment like other popular linux distros). While I am sure there is a mouse driver included I doubt plugging a mouse in will do anything useful. I will plug in an optical mouse into the roboRio tonight to see what happens and report back.

However, with that said, it sounds like the original poster is trying to use the mouse as a sensor to perform robot navigation. The user should note that the mouse is not the best sensor to do this without modification. The optical mouse is just a camera that takes approximately 1500 pics per second of the surface it is on. It uses a Digital Signal Processor on board to calculate heading and distance traveled by comparing images. The current Diode diffuser in most optical mouses won't work if moved a few centimeters off the surface.

It is not impossible to pull something like this off, and many people have already attempted to do what I believe you are suggesting. See: http://home.roadrunner.com/~maccody/...1/croms-1.html and https://www.google.com/url?q=http://...G4QKjgg6V70BJw

To pull this off for FRC I am sure will require modification to the driver as well hardware. If the user wants to have a sensor which tracks actual robot motion, a more FRC robust idea would be to build an enclosure with two omniwheels mounted perpendicular to each other, and have an encoder reading each wheel. This would be more inline with a trackball mouse, however made using more reliable parts for FRC. As the robot moves these wheels will contact the ground, and because they are omnis, wont add too much drag to the normal robot motion. Having two of these position a known distance from each other can also help the user calculate yaw about the robot center. Some FRC teams have done similar in the past.

Hope this helps,
Kevin