Since the world decided to transition from mechanical spherical mouse to optical mouse, we have computer pointer devices that do not need regular cleaning and have much better performance than our ancestors. They do this by using a miniature digital camera to monitor changes in motion. As we have seen before, this mechanism can be converted into an actual camera, but until now, we have not seen anything similar on a high-performance mouse designed for FPS games.
In this project, [Ankit] is dismantling Logitech g402, a popular game mouse with a performance of up to 4000 DPI. Usually, this is processed inside the mouse to convert movement into cursor movement, but this mouse is conveniently equipped with a familiar STM32 processor, which already has SPI interface on the PCB and can be quickly connected to collect image data. [Ankit] created a customized USB vendor specific endpoint, and wrote a Linux kernel module to parse the data into a customized GUI program, which can display the image captured by the mouse sensor on the screen.
If you plan to reuse the mouse, it’s best not to try this project, because the customized firmware seems to make the mouse useless as an actual mouse. But as a proof of concept project, this high-performance mouse can really be used as a camera, although its resolution is very low according to modern digital camera standards. However, thanks to the high-performance sensors in the game mouse, it is a great improvement over the old mouse camera we have seen before.