So, being halfbakers and all, you have got to know about the watches that wind themselves as you walk and swing your arms. Instead of a wireless mouse that you need to replace the battery in constantly, or a rechargable one that needs to be put on the charger every 12 hours or so, just install a mechanism like the ones found in these watches to generate energy to power the mouse. Even if this couldnt provide all of the power, it could supplement a battery (rechargable or not) to greatly enhance the battery life.-- roleohibachi, Dec 07 2005 Seiko 'Kinetic' watch technology - how it works http://www.seiko.co...etic_technology.asp [hippo, Dec 07 2005] Kinetic Mobile Phone Kinetic_20Mobile_20Phone [hippo, Dec 07 2005] For wireless optical mice, the shaking flashlight thing might work. There was an idea here where someone explained how that worked using plutonium or something similar. (I fear the idea got deleted).-- Zimmy, Dec 07 2005 You fear the oddest things.-- bristolz, Dec 07 2005 Why not just take power from the clickers and roller.-- Antegrity, Dec 07 2005 The mouse would appear much more "mouse-like" if a crooked little crank-handle tail were appended to it.-- lurch, Dec 07 2005 I like the idea of a little generator on the ball. Since generators can be used in reverse (as motors), then those software training screen captures, with the mouse pointer clicking on various items on the screen, could be made to seem as if a ghost hand was actually moving the mouse around.-- Ling, Dec 07 2005 There is an older form of powering a watch from body motion which is just called 'Automatic' A semi-circular weight is allowed to spin about the centre of its straight-edge, feeding the rotation via a number of gears back into the spring. Seiko's 'Kinetic' works in a similar way (I think) only the power is fed into a battery rather than a spring.
For the idea, it might be nice to have an Automatic movement, making it a clockwork mouse - which for one reason or another has a nice ring to it.-- zen_tom, Dec 07 2005 As I seem to recall, the shaking flashlight thing was powered by moving a magnetic or ferrous mass through a magnetic or ferrous tube. Plutonium was not required.
However, the powerful magnets may pose problems to people with pace makers, or to magnetic data, such as credit cards, archaic data storage devices, and possibly hard drives... as well as distorting the image on CRT screens. Warnings against using this with older computers might be necessary.-- ye_river_xiv, May 14 2008 You have to constantly adjust/tilt the axis of rotation for the unbalanced wheel to rotate (a la Seiko Kinetic). The mouse generally works on a plane, the desk surface. You would have to move your mouse on a wok for this to be of value. Bun for that!-- 4whom, May 14 2008 random, halfbakery