h a l f b a k e r yPoof of concept
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Blower mouse
A mouse that blows grit off the mouse mat when you press both buttons | |
Let's give the humble mouse a swansong - it won't be
long
before we find ourselves dealing with people who have
only seen them in the movies.
Few things irritate me as much as my hand coming into
contact with bits of stuff on the mouse mat. Brushing is
often ineffective because some kinds
of gunk don't shift
when a contact technique is applied, and often my aim is
poor because I don't want to take my eyes off the screen
or release the mouse at that moment.
So what we're talking about is a mouse with an internal
fan that fires when you hold both buttons down. Getting
a
sufficient blast from typical power sources like USB or
batteries while also achieving good mat coverage would
require cunning venting - I'm picturing a thin gap all the
way around the base of the mouse, angled so that the air
hits the surface of the mat at a shallow angle and
continues horizontally along the surface of the mat
without
losing too much oomph.
There are a lot of similar airy mouse concepts including
the vacuum and hover versions, but I'm pretty sure
they're
all trying to solve different problems.
[link]
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You could get enough energy from a USB port to fire an igniter to initiate a thin pad of nitrocellulose ... that would give a suitable blast of high-pressure gas ... [+] |
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I think that a vacuum mouse might work better, although you would probably need to keep it running while you move you hand around the mouse pad a bit, and you would have to empty the dirt from you mouse (ew). |
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Blowing would probably still work though. [+] |
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[+] What erenjay and 21q said. And there is enough space inside a mouse to serve as a collection pan for the vacuumed-up dirt. |
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Could the dirt be compressed into pellets (perhaps with the aid of atmospheric moisture and skin oils harvested from the user's fingertips)? The pellets could be deposited by the mouse as it roams across your desk. |
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//my aim is poor because I don't want to take my eyes off the screen// |
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Perhaps some stuff-detection whiskers on the mouse could feed signals to software, which would then generate a dynamically positioned stuff-icon on the desktop; its location being such that if you move the mouse pointer to the stuff-icon, the mouse is in the right position to vent at or ingest the stuff. |
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//The problem with blowing is that you're just creating
another mess elsewhere (like possibly into the keyboard,
which I find even more maddening) that will still need to
be cleaned.// |
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Yep vacuuming is tidier overall, but mice are typically
found in the workplace (along with other legacies of
technology such as a standard Windows XP image,
Microsoft tablets and policies banning the use of cloud
storage), so cleaning and vacuuming is not my problem
unless the grit has aggregated to casually observable size |
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//Could the dirt be compressed into pellets//
//Perhaps some stuff-detection whiskers// |
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I think the mouse should also emit a few high-pitched
noises when it's it use to disguise the irritating fan noise.
I also understand that milk-based protein is a good power
source if it can be "fed" into the mouse somehow |
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I have always had a problem with my mouse hand getting cold, maybe if the mouse had some kind of cloth covering... |
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