Mouse Mite

I spend nearly as much time cleaning the top of my mouse as I do using it. I'm sure I'm not the only one. Now, a solution is at hand.

You can get various makes and models of floor-cleaning "mopping" robots that drive around while pushing a wet cloth along the floor: [link]. Some of these do a surprisingly good job.

Now you can get a computer mouse with a tiny mopping robot built in! When you take your hand off your mouse for a few seconds, it pops out and scurries around on top of the mouse (attached by a magnet in its base to a layer of steel inside the mouse's body) to clean off the dust and grime that annoys your mousing hand and/or eyes. It's powered by electromagnetic induction (same as wireless phone chargers).

The body of the mouse is made of smooth black plastic that's transparent to infrared light, which is shone into the edge of the plastic by LEDs. Where there is dust on the surface, this frustrates the total internal reflection of the IR light in the plastic [link], and causes the light to come out of the plastic and be detected by a layer of positionally light-sensitive material between the plastic outer shell and the steel layer. This is used to guide the cleaning robot to the dust. The same system is used to determine when the mouse is being gripped by the user, to avoid cleaning at those times. If the robot is still cleaning and you want to use the mouse again, just tap anywhere on the mouse, and it will go inside. When the robot is back inside the mouse, its cleaning cloth gets rinsed with fresh cleaning solution from a reservoir, and the dirty solution stored in another reservoir.

N/A [2018-12-18]