How do you use 2 optical mice to measure the movement of a surface?

[JimboC]

Hi, I'm not sure where to start with this project. I'm using 2 optical USB mice to track the movement of a surface. Can I read the USB data directly into MATLAB or LabVIEW somehow and extract out the movements? How can I do this? Thanks in advance.

JimboC

[rsw]

Hi,

This sounds like an interesting project, I'm not sure under MATLAB but under LabVIEW you can get the position of a mouse - I've never tried it with 2 mice at the same time before so I'm not sure how that'd react. I will find a second mouse today and give this a go to see how it reacts and let you know. Which version of LabVIEW would this be under?

Regards,

[JimboC]

Hi Rob,

Thanks for your reply. My Labview software is on its way and is a university standard set presumably a reasonably recent one. if you need the exact spec I will know in a few of days. I am trying something at the moment using an Arduino to decode the mouse data, it's working for ps/2 mice but not for USB. Labview will probably still be a good way of displaying and processing the data as I don't know if Matlab reads serial ports.

James

[johnsold]

James,

You did not indicate what OS you are using. Generally if the OS sees the device as a mouse, the OS will capture the inputs and pass them to applications. This makes it difficult to have the mice represent two different inputs. If you can convince the OS that at least one of the devices is not a mouse, I think you would have better luck.

Lynn

[unclebump]

Might be better with a mouse and a joystick.