acecentre / acemouse

Wireless mouse in the smallest package with all the bells and whistles you would ever want. And open source

AceMouse

Wireless mouse in the smallest package with all the bells and whistles you would ever want. And open source

Aims

• A VERY Small wireless mouse
• VERY Battery efficient
• Can be used on a head/hand/knee. Ie the IMU may change in position so a user needs to tell the system which way is top/forward etc
• Deal with sensitive movement and grosser movement. So filter out jerks etc if needed.
• DONT WORRY ABOUT CLICKS - we can use in built dwell options in the OS or we will use seperate switches for this in our designated software. Down the line we may need to figure this out.. (i.e. wire in a switch jack to pins on the xiao or we may migrate to a https://www.adafruit.com/product/4503 and connect via JST to a X80 https://github.com/acecentre/x80)
• Allow for proportional control as an option. I.e the longer you hold in a direction the faster it goes

Use cases

• a wrist wotn system
• a head mounted system
• inside a wheelchair joystick shaft housing. In this use case we somehow need to undrestabbd any baseline tilt and subtract that from the imu data. I think we could do that with firmware (look at movement over time) but maybe easier with a second imu on the base of the chsir. ie using our x80 board

Notes

• A very small nrf52840 and IMU - im looking at the lsm6ds3 as its built into the seeed studio nrf52840 sense
• We want to use it as a mouse. So it takes the acceleration and gyro data. Converts this to mouse ble hid movements. I have it working in circuitPython but we need to add some functionality.
• Notably: - Add proportional movement. So longer you hold it in one direction it stays there
• Add in option to reposition forward. I have started some code around calibrating direction of the IMU but i dont think we need it. This code seems to suggest we can just figure out which way is top. We just need a paramter to be provided from the user saying which was is forward. https://forum.seeedstudio.com/t/xiao-nrf52840-sense-imu-parked-demo-with-sleep-interrupt-button/272954
• Have an option for sensitivity. I tried doing this in circuitPython but my logic is bad
• Use sleep modes for better battery consumption. This looks really fiddly and tricky in circuitpython and is the main reason we need to consider going to arduino C code.. (alarms in circuitpython - and accessing the IMU interrupt data is spinning my head). Its a shame - i do like the idea of mounting the circuitpy drive and just editing a json file. We could use BLEUART and app (see my xcode file which starts this with a calibration thing.. we could just make this somekind of editor to BLEUART remote calls if we need to but we would need a way of turning this mode on and off so we dont waste power (Maybe the double tap detector built into the IMU)

Hardware

• Aim of this is to do this with as minimal electronics as possible.
• We use currently a seeed studio XIAO nrf52840 Sense. This has a 6 axis IMU - and bluetooth stack is solid.
• You could easily seperate this out to just the IMU and a seperate chip.

Software

• CircuitPython on the board
• SwiftUI app to configure over bleuart