This Guy Built a Compact Camera Using an Optical Mouse

Reddit user Dycus built a camera using the sensor from an optical mouse. After about 65 hours of work, Dycus had a low-resolution black-and-white camera with multiple shooting modes, housed in a nifty 3D-printed body.

PetaPixel has previously reported on similar projects that turn old optical computer mice into functional cameras, but Dycus’ project is unique in that he designed a full-blown camera.

I made a camera from an optical mouse. 30×30 pixels in 64 glorious shades of gray!
byu/Dycus in3Dprinting

Optical computer mice work by detecting movement with a photoelectric cell (or sensor) and a light. The light is emitted downward, striking a desk or mousepad, and then reflecting to the sensor. The sensor has a lens to help direct the reflected light, enabling the mouse to convert precise physical movement into an input for the computer’s on-screen cursor. The way the reflected changes in response to movement is translated into cursor movement values.

It’s a clever solution for a fundamental computer problem: how to control the cursor. For most computer users, that’s fine, and they can happily use their mouse and go about their day. But when Dycus came across a PCB from an old optical mouse, which they had saved because they knew it was possible to read images from an optical mouse sensor, the itch to build a mouse-based camera was too much to ignore.

The new optical mouse camera has a lot of neat features, including multiple shooting modes, numerous color palettes (the camera itself has 64 shades of gray), controllable exposure, and 32kB of on-camera storage to save up to 48 pictures. In addition to a standard single-shot mode, the camera also captures quad shots and “smear” shots, which are panoramas.

“The panorama ‘smear shot’ is definitely my favorite mode, it scans out one column at a time across the screen as you sweep the camera,” Dycus writes on Reddit. “It’s scaled 2x vertically but 1x horizontally, so you get extra ‘temporal resolution’ horizontally if you do the sweep well.”

The optical mouse camera can also record movements, like it would if it were integrated into an actual mouse, and convert motion into drawings on the camera’s screen.

Given that the camera isn’t even sniffing one megapixel territory — its standard photos are just 900 pixels versus the 1,000,000 required to hit 1MP — the image quality is not particularly impressive, but as Dycus notes and Game Boy Camera enthusiasts can attest, it’s not about the resolution, it’s about the fun factor.

“Despite the low resolution, it’s easily possible to take recognizable pictures of stuff,” Dycus says. “The ‘high’ color depth definitely helps. I’d like it to the Game Boy Camera (which I also enjoy), which is much higher resolution but only has four colors.”