[Coco] The RAT Graphics Mouse

[George Ramsower]

Gene H.

  It seems this would be cool option for your router, to switch to the mouse
and control a starting position of the servos. Simply convert the number
from the mouse to step those servos and place the thing close to where you
want to begin the next operation.
 I think I might experiment with this on my CNC Dremmel. (Hafta find an old
mouse to connect to one of the serial ports on that coco I built for this
sort of stuff).

George


----- Original Message -----
From: "tim lindner" <tlindner at ix.netcom.com>
To: "CoCoList for Color Computer Enthusiasts" <coco at maltedmedia.com>
Sent: Thursday, January 27, 2005 7:40 PM
Subject: [Coco] The RAT Graphics Mouse


> Michael Crawford recently sent me a CoCo mouse to reverse engineer. It
> was sold with Diecom's The RAT Graphics package:
>
> http://home.netcom.com/~tlindner/TheRat.html
>
> It appears to an OEM PC mouse from about the 1987 era. The quadrature
> encoding wheels have been hacked to encoding an analog signal sent
> directly to the CoCo. The four values it cycles thru are:
>
>    15, 24, 42, 15
>
> The faster you move the mouse, the faster the numbers cycle.
>
> This is a cool way to handle mouse I/O, becuase no expensive analog to
> digital chip is needed, but it is more complicated to create a software
> driver for this kind of mouse.
>
> Since the mouse only gives you the horizontal and vertical components of
> the speed and direction (a vector) you have to calculate the position of
> the pointer in the CPU. But you do get infinate resolution. That's a
> bonus!
>
> --
> tim lindner
> tlindner at ix.netcom.com                                        Bright
>
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