A compact camera built using an optical mouse
134 points
2 days ago
| 10 comments
| petapixel.com
| HN
MarkusWandel
2 days ago
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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.
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lillecarl
6 hours ago
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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!

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ACCount37
4 hours ago
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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.

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SiempreViernes
3 hours ago
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> Because medicine is where "move fast and break things" means people immediately die.

Fixed the typo for you.

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ACCount37
2 hours ago
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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.

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omnicognate
1 hour ago
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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.
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arcanemachiner
4 hours ago
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To anyone wondering:

BCI == Brain-computer interface

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brain–computer_interface

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Lapsa
4 hours ago
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mind reading technology has already arrived. radiomyography & neural networks deciphering EEGs
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ACCount37
3 hours ago
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Not really. Non-invasive interfaces don't have the resolution. Can't make an omelet without cracking open a few skulls.
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Lapsa
11 minutes ago
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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
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metalman
4 hours ago
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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

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makeitdouble
2 hours ago
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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.

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immibis
3 hours ago
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use the washer button to spray the windshield with water and help the goo wipe off
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JKCalhoun
13 minutes ago
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"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?)

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consumer451
51 minutes ago
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anotherpaul
6 hours ago
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zamadatix
1 hour ago
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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.

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mdtrooper
3 hours ago
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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.

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gsf_emergency_6
5 hours ago
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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)

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fph
3 hours ago
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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.
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gsf_emergency_6
1 hour ago
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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)
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HPsquared
2 hours ago
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I wonder how much quality you could get out of that sensor.
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shit_game
1 hour ago
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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.

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eugene3306
1 hour ago
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Just in case the author is here: what's the FPS?
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jan_Sate
1 hour ago
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Impressive. That's what I read HN for!
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foxglacier
5 hours ago
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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.
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