Headmouse is my "ode to laziness" :)
It's a project made from two thing:
- curiosity if simple gyroscope could be good enough to act as a computer mouse
- Laziness when I was coding, and didn't want to take my hands of the keyboard to grab a mouse
So I'm using vim, 'vimium' in browser and I use keyboard shortcuts extensively, but not everywhere - specially when browsing web- it's possible to use keyboard only.... .... and normal mouse is soooooo far.....
Initial idea was to use accelerometer, however it has a limitation that the reading are based on gravity vector.
So I had a second attempt, where I have added a magnetometer to this setup, but the readings were too slow or too noisy.
Further reading showed that the data should be better if I would use DMP (Digital motion processor). I could do this, however I had only mpu6050 without a magnetometer, so I've decided to ditch that as well.
I believe it's possible to get better results using gyro ,accell and magnet data combined. However I've decided to use gyroscope in this attempt.
It's much simpler - trivial I would say. However, it works.
Raspberry PI pico was used since I had it at home + mpu6050.
Pins used in this example are SCL: 15 , SDA : 14. Plus power, plus ground. Take a look at your MPU6050 pinout for more details.
Any microcontroller could be used. I would go with esp32 next time since it's cheap, and it could be wireless then.
I was thinking about adding UART BT module like HC-05. This modification would be simple, however I would have to find a way to provide power source, which is easy, but It would make the device bigger and heavier I guess.
Casing is taken from some sweets - I think it was mentos :)
Besides hardware, you need to upload micropython code to your rpi pico. Open Thony, and run "MPU6050_calibration" to obtain calibration data for your device. this step is important since every physical device has a little different Characteristics
Desktop part is just a simple python script. Download it, install dependencies and run it.
pip install -f requirements.txt Additional config can be found in config.ini
[APP]
filter = 5
sensitivity = 30
x-axis = x
y-axis = z
x-axis-modifier = 1.1
y-axis-modifier = -1
COM = 3I think it is simple to understand what parameter is used for what. In my case I have changed x-axis-modifier to 1.1 - usually it should be 1 or -1, but I have pretty wide monitor, so I wanted something little different.
But moving a cursor is not everything. Like I said THe goal wos to keep you hand on keyboard So I have added global hot keys. You can add, edit them in main.py in desktop folder
bindings = [
[["control", "shift", "q"], None, quit],
[["control", "shift", "a"], None, toggle_mouse_active],
[["control", "shift", "z"], None, click],
[["control", "shift", "x"], None, right_click],
[["control", "shift", "3"], None, center],
[["control", "shift", "1"], None, decrease_sensitivity],
[["control", "shift", "2"], None, increase_sensitivity],
]And thats basically it :)
Here is a video of prototype in action:
