[HN Gopher] A compact camera built using an optical mouse
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A compact camera built using an optical mouse
Author : PaulHoule
Score : 226 points
Date : 2025-12-03 16:02 UTC (3 days ago)
(HTM) web link (petapixel.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (petapixel.com)
| MarkusWandel wrote:
| I always say "on a scale from no canoe to a $5K canoe, even the
| crappiest canoe is 80% of the way there". This camera illustrates
| that for vision. When you hear about those visual implants that
| give you, say, 16x16 grayscale you think that's nothing. Yet
| 30x30 grayscale as seen in this video, especially with live
| updates and not just a still frame is... vision. Not 80% of the
| way there, but does punch way above its weight class in terms of
| usefulness.
| lillecarl wrote:
| Diminishing returns explained through canoes :)
|
| 16x16 sounds really shit for me who still has perfect vision
| indeed but I bet it's life changing to be able to identify
| presence / absence of stuff around you and such! Yay for
| technology!
| ACCount37 wrote:
| This kind of thing is really held back by BCI tech.
|
| By now, we have smartphones with camera systems that beat
| human eyes, and SoCs powerful enough to perform whatever
| image processing you want them to, in real time.
|
| But our best neural interfaces have the throughput close to
| that of a dial-up modem, and questionable longevity. Other
| technological blockers advanced in leaps and bounds, but SOTA
| on BCI today is not that far away from 20 years ago. Because
| medicine is where innovation goes to die.
|
| It's why I'm excited for the new generation of BCIs like
| Neuralink. For now, they're mostly replicating the old
| capabilities, but with better fundamentals. But once the
| fundamentals - interface longevity, ease of installation,
| ease of adaptation - are there? We might actually get more
| capable, more scalable BCIs.
| arcanemachiner wrote:
| To anyone wondering:
|
| BCI == Brain-computer interface
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brain-computer_interface
| Lapsa wrote:
| mind reading technology has already arrived.
| radiomyography & neural networks deciphering EEGs
| ACCount37 wrote:
| Not really. Non-invasive interfaces don't have the
| resolution. Can't make an omelet without cracking open a
| few skulls.
| Lapsa wrote:
| they do read my mind at least to some extent -> "The
| paper concludes that it is possible to detect changes in
| the thickness and the properties of the muscle solely by
| evaluating the reflection coefficient of an antenna
| structure." https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/6711930
| SiempreViernes wrote:
| > Because medicine is where "move fast and break things"
| means people immediately die.
|
| Fixed the typo for you.
| ACCount37 wrote:
| Not moving fast and not breaking things means people die
| slowly and excruciatingly. Because the solutions for
| their medical issues were not developed in time.
|
| Inaction has a price, you know.
| omnicognate wrote:
| It has a price for the person with the condition. For the
| person developing the cure it does not (except perhaps
| opportunity cost, money not made that could have been),
| whereas killing their patients can have an extremely high
| one.
| jama211 wrote:
| You're starting to sound terrifyingly like an unethical
| scientist. We know how that ends, we've been down that
| road before, and we know why it is a terrible idea.
| rogerrogerr wrote:
| There is a lot of space between "persons with a
| debilitating condition are prohibited from choosing to
| take a risky treatment that might help" and "hey let's
| feed these prisoners smallpox-laced cheese for a week and
| see what happens".
|
| The "no harm, ever" crowd does not have a monopoly on
| ethics.
| chmod775 wrote:
| The majority of treatments people ever thought up and
| think up today are somewhere between useless and terrible
| ideas. Whatever you think is looking so exciting right
| now, there have been a million other things that looked
| just as exciting before. They do not anymore.
|
| We didn't come up with these rules around medical
| treatments out of nowhere, humanity has _learned_ them
| through painful lessons.
|
| The medical field used to operate very differently and I
| do not want to go back to those times.
| metalman wrote:
| it is a good ilustration of something like moores law, for a
| comming end point where a hand held device will have more
| than enough cabability and capacity to do ANYTHING, a meer
| mortal will EVER require, and the death of options and
| features, and a return to personal autonomy and
| responsibility
|
| AI is the final failure of "intermitent" wipers,which like my
| latest car, is irevocably enabled to smeer the road grime and
| imperceptable "rain" into a goo, blocking by ability to see
| immibis wrote:
| use the washer button to spray the windshield with water
| and help the goo wipe off
| metalman wrote:
| yes, obviously, but my point is that I am now tasked with
| helping the "feature" limp along, whenever it lurches,
| unexpectedly, into action, therby ADDING distraction
| which if you read the ancient myths and legends is one of
| the main methods that evil spirits and deamons undermine
| and defeat the unwary....and lull them into becoming
| possesed, hosts, for said entities.
|
| who's working for who here anyway?
|
| already?
| makeitdouble wrote:
| True. Then we cross a threshold where things that weren't
| even thought as possible become reachable, and we're back
| on the treadmill.
|
| That's what we're having with VR: we came to a point where
| increasing DPI for laptop or phone seemed to make no sense;
| but that was also the point where VR started to be
| reachable, and over there a 300DPI screen is crude and we'd
| really want 3x that pixel density.
| SwtCyber wrote:
| The moment you add motion and temporal continuity, even a
| postage-stamp image turns into something your brain can work
| with
| MarkusWandel wrote:
| The brain really is quite a machine. I've personally had a
| retinal tear lasered. It's well within my peripheral vision,
| and the lasering of course did more damage (but prevents it
| from spreading). How much of this can I _see_? Nothing! My
| peripheral vision appears continuous. Probably I 'd miss a
| motion event only visible to that eye only in that particular
| zone. Not to mention the enormous number of "floaters" one
| gets especially by my age (58). Sometimes you see them but
| for the most part the brain just filters them out.
|
| Where this becomes relevant is when you consider
| depixellation. True blur can't be undone, but pixellation
| without appropriate antialiasing filtering...
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=acKYYwcxpGk
|
| So if your 30x30 camera has _sharp_ square pixels with no
| antialiasing filter in front of the sensor, I 'll bet the
| brain would soon learn to "run that depixellation algorithm"
| and just by natural motion of the camera, learn to recognize
| finer detail. Of course that still means training the brain
| to recognize 900 electrodes, which is beyond the current
| state of the art (but 16x16 pixels aren't and the same
| principle can apply there).
| jacquesm wrote:
| It would be interesting to see how far you could push that.
| I bet just two scanlines side-by-side would be enough for
| complete imaging. Maybe even just one, but that would
| require a lot more pre-processing and much finer control
| over the angle of movement. Congrats on the positive
| outcome of that surgery, that must have been pretty scary.
| dehrmann wrote:
| In some situations, you can trade resolution for frequency
| and maintain quality. 1-bit audio is a thing:
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Direct_Stream_Digital
| anotherpaul wrote:
| The original post:
| https://www.reddit.com/r/electronics/comments/1olyu7r/i_made...
|
| The video on Reddit:
| https://www.reddit.com/r/3Dprinting/comments/1olyzn6/i_made_...
| zamadatix wrote:
| One of the comments from the creator answered one of my
| questions https://www.reddit.com/r/3Dprinting/comments/1olyzn6/
| comment...:
|
| > Do you mean the refresh rate should be higher? There's two
| things limiting that: > - The sensor isn't optimized for
| actually reading out images, normally it just does internal
| processing and spits out motion data (which is at high speed).
| You can only read images at about 90Hz > - Writing to the
| screen is slow because it doesn't support super high clock
| speeds. Drawing a 3x scale image (90x90 pixels) plus reading
| from the sensor, I can get about 20Hz, and a 1x scale image
| (30x30 pixels) I can get 50Hz.
|
| I figured there would be limitations around the second, but I
| was hoping the former wasn't such a big limit.
| gsf_emergency_6 wrote:
| Compressed sensing! What Terence Tao uses to sell math funding!!
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EE9AETSoPHw&t=44
|
| https://www.instructables.com/Single-Pixel-Camera-Using-an-L...
|
| (Okay not the same guy, but I wanted to share this somewhat
| related "extreme" camera project)
| fph wrote:
| Is this compressed sensing though? The description says "Sensor
| 30x30 pixels, 64 colors (ADNS-3090 if you wanna look it up)",
| so definitely not a single-pixel camera.
| gsf_emergency_6 wrote:
| Sorry to get you confused. This is a different setup. TFA
| uses the 30x30 and no compressed sensing. The link above uses
| a single photo detector. They also use an LED matrix, but
| that's to make the _image_ (I think)
| HPsquared wrote:
| I wonder how much quality you could get out of that sensor.
| foxglacier wrote:
| I have to say, the Game Boy camera doesn't have only 4 colors. It
| has an analog output you can connect to your own ADC with more
| bits and get more shades of gray. I even managed to get color
| pictures out of it by swapping color filters and combining the
| images.
| mdtrooper wrote:
| These kind of news are for me the real news for this website
| instead of a new fancy tech product of Apple or similar
| corporation.
|
| Sincerely a lot of thanks.
| SwtCyber wrote:
| Corporate launches are predictable and polished; projects like
| this are the opposite
| bbeonx wrote:
| agreed...i think it's fine to keep up with what the corporate
| world is doing, but these projects bring me real joy
| jan_Sate wrote:
| Impressive. That's what I read HN for!
| eugene3306 wrote:
| Just in case the author is here: what's the FPS?
| madars wrote:
| On Reddit, author says "The preview is shown at 20fps for a 3x
| scale image (90x90 pixels) and 50fps for a 1x scale image. This
| is due to the time it takes to read the image data from the
| sensor (~10ms) and the max write speed of the display.", and
| adds that optical mice motion tracking goes to 6400 fps for
| this sensor but you can't actually transmit image at that rate.
|
| https://old.reddit.com/r/electronics/comments/1olyu7r/i_made...
| shit_game wrote:
| Very cool project. I love the detail the poster went into in
| their linked video post about working with the sensor and their
| implementation.
|
| > 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.
|
| I can't tell if this grammatical error is a result of nonchalant
| editing and a lack of proofreading or a person touching-up LLM
| content.
|
| > 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.
|
| Ah, it's an LLM. Dogshit grifter article. Honestly, the HN link
| should be changed to the reddit post.
| foxglacier wrote:
| LLM or not doesn't matter as much as it's just bad reader-
| hostile writing with a dump of trivial details while also
| glossing over the relevant part (how does a mouse detect
| movement).
| consumer451 wrote:
| Direct link to the reddit post:
|
| https://old.reddit.com/r/electronics/comments/1olyu7r/i_made...
| JKCalhoun wrote:
| "I made a camera from an optical mouse. 30x30 pixels in 64
| glorious shades of gray!"
|
| I wonder why so many shades of grey? Fancy!
|
| (Yeah, the U.K. spelling of "grey" looks more "gray" to these
| American eyes.)
|
| Hilarious too that this article is on Petapixel. (Centipixel?)
| SwtCyber wrote:
| What I love most is that it takes something we all interact with
| every day
| supportengineer wrote:
| This is fantastic. What an amazing project! There is a certain
| segment of photography enthusiasts who love the aesthetic.
| ck2 wrote:
| vaguely related but exponentially more impressive
|
| camera the size of a grain of rice with 320x320 resolution
|
| https://ams-osram.com/products/sensor-solutions/cmos-image-s...
| buildbot wrote:
| Woah, "wafer level optics" sounds really fancy
|
| https://www.mouser.com/datasheet/3/5912/1/NanEyeC_DS000503_5...
| jacquesm wrote:
| These are 'optical flow' chips. They are quite interesting for
| many reasons.
| kachapopopow wrote:
| Waiting until someone builds a high speed camera using mouse
| sensors.
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