I like to use this as a space to blog some of the source material for my projects. This "cheap" motion capture suit...
...has served as part of the inspiration for the somewhat less expensive creation that you see in the form my most recent full-body-drawing device (see below).
Having been through a micro-controller permutation (notice all limbs invovled)...
...I have returned to the mice in order to refine the prototype posted below. The inspiration has come via scratch-hero-wanna-bees whose budget doesn't allow for the purchase of turntables. They've taken apart mice and rigged them up into a turntable-like interface with a belt system that will allow me to do away with the convoluted system of cords and counter weights that you see in the first version of this piece. This via the make blog
So this is the first prototype for the no strings project. I built it by wiring two roller ball mice together so that one would control the x axis of cursor movement with the other controlling the y. The goal of this contraption is to create a mark making device that can be controlled by flexing and extending the elbow and knee joints (the incorporation of the knees will allow for two marks to be made simultaneously by all four limbs). I wanted to post this image and explanation here so that i could blog a bit of the source material for this project.
Amongst the sources are electr-o-sketch this stepper motor driven etch-a-sketch adaption where control of the traditional etch-a-sketch is transferred over to a serial mouse.
This site was also useful for its listing of alternative mouse systems, and of course the hackers of all things electrical, bless them for showing the way in the destruction and occasionally successful re-application of perfectly good pieces on electronic equipment.
"The paintbrush for Head Alignment is a modified broom, which is connected to
a Wiring microcontroller that activates electronically controlled airbrush nozzles
at specific moments in the broom's travel." more here
