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Unread 22-04-2008, 18:57
Jared Russell's Avatar
Jared Russell Jared Russell is offline
Taking a year (mostly) off
FRC #0254 (The Cheesy Poofs), FRC #0341 (Miss Daisy)
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Re: "mouse encoders"

I've thought about this before, and ran into the same problem that you described. Commercial mice are just not made for high speeds. Can it be done? Sure - but you will need a lot of expertise on the subject, not to mention the ability to fabricate optics.

I am, however, working on something similar for next years' control system using optical flow navigation from a downwards-pointing digital camera. With the processing power of the cRIO, it might just work. Basically, you take a picture of the carpet, then another picture a fraction of a second later. You can solve the optimization problem to determine the vector relating the movement between the two shots. At a high enough speed (I'm hoping for 15-30Hz), you can essentially get optical mouse-like results.