If you are tired of using your hands to control you mouse why not make yourself a foot mouse! Yes there are commercial models available, but what fun it buying something if you can make it…
“A footmouse made by myself. My right foot controls directly the position of the cursor (not the speed), and my left foot controls 4 mousebuttons.
The mechanism for both pedals consist of a ballbearing (for left and right move) and a simple doorhinge (for forward-down and backward).
I used a logitech cordless optical mouse.
The optical part of the mouse is in front of my right foot.
The optical part is 90 degrees rotated, so that has to be corrected in the mouse driver. In Windows I use an older logitech mouse driver, and in Linux I adjusted the xorg.conf file.”
Thanks Johan
February 12th, 2007
Very ingenious, and entertaining!
You say “The optical part is 90 degrees rotated,
so that has to be corrected in the mouse driver.”
Could you say how you did this? Did you hack the driver?
I heard that there is an open source Logitech mouse driver for Windows
(yes windows) that some people in various gaming communities have been modifying
to enhance game play. I’ve been looking, but didn’t find it. Any ideas? (Thanks.)
February 18th, 2007
Hello, I did not hack the driver. I simply set the direction, which is a standard feature in the Logitec driver.
The newest Logitech mouse driver doesn’t allow to set the direction for normal mouses, only for trackballs. So I took an older driver (version 9.42) which allowed to set the direction for every mouse.
The mouse I used is a Cordless MouseMan Optical. I think there are a few different versions of those. But the one I purchased had two circuit-boards inside. A small circuit-board for the optial part and a larger circuit-board for the rest. The optical part was in north-south direction, but I attached it on front of the right pedal so it became east-west.
There are a few open source drivers for some specific Logitech mouse-functions, but as far as I know there is not a fully driver for Windows for all mouses.
kind regards,
Johan