Why would you scan things with a... mouse?
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- čas přidán 5. 06. 2024
- I've seen a lot of interesting image capture devices but this one just takes the cake... and... drops it upside down in the road. It's so close to a good idea. It is not, however, a good idea.
Disclaimer: Since there was some concern over how people interpreted a couple things I said, I want to make my perspective clear. I know next to nothing about the companies I am badmouthing in this video, I just consider all modern businesses to be liars and all products to be untrustworthy and potentially unsafe. My comments are in general, not specific.
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Chapters:
00:00 Product overview
04:05 Setup
07:45 Big Twist
08:16 Demo
12:20 Company info
16:10 Hardware failure
18:24 Technology overview
25:50 Teardown / Analysis
36:25 Design flaws
44:05 Anticapitalist diatribe
48:16 Outro - Věda a technologie
![A CD-R, that's only partly a CD-R [Ricoh Encryptease]](http://i.ytimg.com/vi/_5ucImqdKbY/mqdefault.jpg)
![A CD-R, that's only partly a CD-R [Ricoh Encryptease]](/img/tr.png)
![1000ft of ANALOG HD video over a single cable?! [AHD/CVI/TVI]](http://i.ytimg.com/vi/YYAVrLBKavM/mqdefault.jpg)
As "Technology Connections" would say..."Through the magic of buying two of them."
"Through the magic of being donated two of them by a generous supporter..."
That joke will never get old 🤣
As "Blue Peter" would say:
"Here is one I made earlier"
I searched the comments for this exact quote 😂
The crossover event we all need.
I would add one other [infuriating] factor driving what happens in tech innovation: "How can we turn this into a subscription service?"
absolutely, if this thing had been just a couple years later it would have been right into that crap, haha.
That's my favorite.
You can hardly call it innovation at all. It's really a symptom of a fatal flaw in the system, companies need to keep "evolving" their products but we've reached a point where most software can barely be improved in ways that are interesting to customers. You need endless growth to stay in business but there's only so much growth that is actually needed or can be done at all, so they start profiting off of their power as a monopoly, because they can't deliver any more value to justify their existence (most big software companies can't, it seems)
Need your seats heated??? that will be 15 bucks please!
@@davidmiller9485 I would actually like my seats chilled, what would be the subscription for that? Also to what guarantee is the cooling power of the seats? I am looking to refrigerate my lunch on the passenger seat in full sun if at all possible.
On the straight to landfill note. A PC shop in the UK for a while sold used broken hard drives with OEM cost windows licences, offering to save the shipping and just recycle the hard drive for you and email the licence. It was just a way to trick Microsoft into saying the licence is sold with a device, but was quite comedic.
Smart business lol
LOL, that is hilarious, even beat the Soviet tricks of selling burned out light bulb, why would you buy an burned out light bulb.
Well you took it to work or other places and switched it for an working one, it was an light bulb shortage but now it was other peoples problem.
Downside is that it was theft.
Including broken hardware to make it an OEM is not an crime who make it brilliant but also hilarious.
Yes I know lots of stores just sold the OEM windows outright, if a bit smart they added that the customer bought an mouse but returned it.
@@magnemoe1 Or like when a restaurant is running out of napkins so they send a waiter with $1.00 to go to another restaurant....to buy a hamburger and then steal all of THEIR napkins.
Good to live in Germany. Here it's illegal to bind software to hardware, so you can sell the OEM license without issues.
There was a company in the US that did that with salvaged motherboards from old pcs.
As a non native English speaker, I really appreciate your elegant and clear pronunciation. I'm using your videos to train my nephews on English phonetics.
@@handlesarefeckinstupid 😂😂😂😂
@@handlesarefeckinstupid ... which square mile of England are you using for your baseline there?
Fun fact, as long as it's able to be understood well, no one really cares which version of english you're speaking, save for annoying pedants~
As another Spanish speaker, nice to see you in tech videos. Channels like this are some of the best the internet has to offer, it's a shame there's so little content like this in our own language.
Good on you for teaching your nephews to be bilingual, I wish my parents did the same!
I love the dual tracking sensors tracking the angle of the mouse, I'd want to see that copied in a modern mouse to allow you to send angle data to painting apps, and more importantly to allow for a pointlessly fancy mouse cursor that rotates like the cursors on the nintendo wii
Didn't the cursor also zoom in and out based on distance to the "sensor" bar?
That last part is definitely the most important, I'd pay good money for that!
It could allow you to turn icons on your desktop for no reason too lol
it might sound silly at first thought... but.. On my Wacom Cintiq tablet it gives me position of the mouse (pen), but also pressure, angle, and tilt. It makes for very intuitive painting as I can use the pressure to auto-update the opacity of the brush, the tilt to shange the size, and the angle to rotate the brush shape.
I am not sure directly what I'd use rotation for in a mouse other than, well, image and video manipulation... maybe one could have knobs on an interface and you rotate it with the mouse. In an FPS game you could even rotate the weapon for gangsta-gun kills.
But the one thing I would really like to see in windows is multi-mouse support in general. To make pinch-zoom gestures and other wild input data.
In general. If they enable the input, we, the users will find ways to use them.
@@jmalmsten Some brushes in Photoshop even change shape depending on the angle of the pen! My mind was blown when I first saw that.
Re the two of them mouse sensors: I'm pretty sure this is so that the software can track how much the device has been rotated, as well as how much it has translated. When you covered up one sensor, it seemed to be acting as if the device was being rotated around a point, which is a fair conclusion for it to make when it sees motion on one sensor but not the other. To put it a fancy way, the device needs to know about three degrees of freedom of motion, but a single mouse sensor only makes a two-DOF measurement. A second sensor provides the additional information it needs.
The mode of failure is interesting: it looks like it thinks the location of the device has jumped, and it's trying to join up the image based on incorrect location information. Perhaps the data from the mouse sensors is getting corrupted by a bad connection or poor firmware?
My suspicion is that when the software auto updated, it downloaded a firmware update for the mouse as well, one that's not actually compatible with it because it was intended for a later version of the hardware. I hadn't initially considered this until someone suggested it after the video was done, and then it occurred to me that these failures may have both followed software upgrades, and then followed the mouse since the firmware now resides on it.
Ah, that makes a lot of sense.
@@CathodeRayDude The firmware update bricking the mouse makes lots of sense, but it stopped working while you were scanning - that's funky. So maybe it's saving some calibration data to its EEPROM and maybe it got corrupted from wrong/incompatible firmware?
@@zaprodk I can't swear to the sequence of events, is the thing. I wasn't thinking that the software update might silently patch the mouse firmware (which is completely nuts anyway, so why would I expect it?) so I wasn't paying enough attention to see whether it died after the update
@@CathodeRayDude Could tyou possibly "update" to an older version of the software and firmware, say from the CD or DVD?
Fun fact: the "gets unsynced when you get back to the beginning of a long scan" thing is called "loop closure" and is a problem/research area in AR/VR tracking.
Oh yeah, it makes perfect sense that this would be a big big problem space. The tiniest accumulated error and the whole thing won't fit together - and the real world has that _damned_ refusal to let itself be perfectly sampled, no matter what Shannon OR Nyquist want to say about it.
@@CathodeRayDude to nitpick, Shannon-Nyquist isn’t about perfect sampling, just good enough 😁 and in this use case there is no such thing as good enough! So in that regard they’re in agreement :)
I assume this is the same as using an accelerometer on a phone to pan around a 360° image/video, then finding the origin point has drifted in real space.
Though of course that isn’t always a problem, and can sometimes be useful - such as those experiments where people think they’re walking straight in VR while they’re actually being induced to walk in circles around the room.
@@kaitlyn__L similar yes, though that's a simpler version of just drift. Drift is accumulated errors, loop closure is failure of transitive property, usually due to minor errors, so pretty similar but somehow mentally different for me. Nice job knowing about redirected walking, too, I didn't realize that was well known outside of academic circles (either that or this comments section is just popping with over educated folks 😁). It's a very clever trick that more or less works in a similar way (tricking your brain into misestimating rotation). Lots of ways to get lost in VR🤣
@@rpavlik1 I think I might just be unusual - I was obsessed with how pilots could think they were flying straight whilst spiralling down as a young’un, so when I heard about it in VR I was like “aha!”
Interesting that loop closure is more than just a specific subset of drift though, but then I’m prone to finding generalisations and conceptual links due to my physics education - eg wave propagation is useful and applicable in acoustics, optics, and quantum mechanics. (And to that end, there’s even many commonalities between music theory and colour theory.)
as an embedded engineer, having an absolute meltdown seeing how many components and boards this thing has inside. Totally looks like a series of dev boards that would be stitched together in an early prototype
indeed, in fact I want it to see if I can take them and make a variant that is actually workable.
I suspect they got to that stage and fired the engineer before they could refine it.
@@SixArmedSweater Exactly, they likely paid the expensive engineering team just long enough to get a working product then they canned them to cut costs. Either that or the executives wanted to get the product out the door and on the shelves ASAP quality be damned and the moment the engineers gave them a mostly working design they deemed it good enough and sent it off to fabrication despite the protests from the designers that it was an unpolished prototype that was not ready for sale.
@@zombieregime Yeah. Slapping an Arduino core on a $2 ESP8266 dev board off AliExpress is all you need for that and, if wired connectivity is necessary, a Chinese Arduino clone and an ENC28J60 or W5500 breakout/shield is still going to be cheaper and less complicated. Anyone who can't do even the tiny bit of research needed for that deserves to lose the money they're wasting.
(Funny enough, I'm doing exactly that to build myself some custom IoT temperature-humidity sensors for around the house. You can even do it without soldering in a size that'll fit in a thoroughly-perforated plastic film canister if you pick up the appropriate "ESP-01" breakout board and a suitable DHT11+USB carrier off eBay... though keeping the humidity reading from drifting toward the dry end as the thing is left running is another matter. I'm planning on hooking up a test rig with several each of a DHT11, DHT22, and a BME280 to compare drift over time with some room for identifying variation within a model.)
Rest In Peace Gibbs. You will aways be a Large Man in our hearts.
Whose Gibbs? What have I missed
@@gavinprosser it was on the last frames of the video: 49:07
@@gavinprosser did Ferris Bueller teach you nothing? Life moves pretty fast. If you don’t stop and look around once in a while, you could miss it...and always watch the credit roll in it's entirety.
RIP Large Man
Happy trails, little buddy. 💕
That diatribe at the end sustains me. There are no more frontiers to run away to. Also: "Cronenbergian Failure Mode" is the name of my new punk band.
Just wanted to say two things: A) I really value the way you can take a throw-away tech product and spin it out into a 50 minute video including a examination of it, some analysis, and then a critique of the modern business environment -- all from a stupid little scanner mouse. It's great. And, B) So sorry to hear about Gibbs. As a life-long cat-owner I've experienced the pain of losing a beloved furball numerous times and it sucks. Please be well.
Gravis, I was happy to see you flying the airplanes yesterday. Your videos have become a very important part of my life, and I hadn't seen a new one for a while, so last week I checked in on you and read about your cat and understood why nothing had been released recently. I am very sorry to hear about your good friend and companion, Gibbs, and I want to know that your creative output is deeply appreciated even by those of us for whom Patreon support is unfeasible. The content, research, delivery style, dumb jokes, and kind demeanor are all right in the sweet spot for Things I Like. Thank You for everything that you are doing. I haven't watched the video yet. I was just very happy to see one released. Hope you're doing well.
Thank you so much for watching and understanding. I'll get by.
@@CathodeRayDude I know you will, you're a fucking badass and I get a kick out of just about everything you do.
We all agree!
This comment reflects my thoughts so well. Thanks, Josh!
And of course: thanks so much, Gravis. Hang in there.
Research + kind demeanor. Yes! Very true!
My mom bought one of these on QVC. Being the computer person in the family, I tried every trick I could think of but the stupid thing worked like one time and never again. No amount of drivers or reinstalls ever fixed it. Not even fresh installs on a new PC. Ours came with a special transparent mouse pad. You put this over whatever you were scanning. Or not scanning, in our case.
Did you watch the QVC presentation? :I've got visions of the thing breaking mid-show.....
I suspect that it was something related to the firmware, maybe even an actual kill switch. _Especially_ with their site explicitly saying that they don't support the things. It's fully possible that the only reason they still have auto-updates available is because the new owners are quietly killing all of the things out of fear that they'll get sued otherwise... or that a laid-off dev was angry enough to intentionally brick the things.
The transparent mouse pad would fix the receipt and photo scanning issue.
@@MadBiker-vj5qj "And the nice thing about these practice Katanas..."
:(
Man, saying goodbye to my feline friend of 18 years was *the single hardest life event* I've ever had to deal with. I feel for you CRD, I really do. Rest easy Gibbs.
Love the little depressing bit at the end about startups/executives/etc in the 2010s and on. Another one of those things that I've always had a hunch about, but never heard anyone put it into words. So much "innovation", so little practical use. Kinda sums up the tech hole the world seems to be falling into.
It legit sooths my soul to finally hear someone point out how crappy the industry has been and become. For every step in convenience and innovation, it's been 20 steps backwards in greed, waste, injustice, and rent seeking.
Your frustration with the lack of authenticity is relatable. I'm sure a lot of us watch your channel for its authenticity of just providing actual value to the viewer.
Man that last bit reminded me of the last time I was in a Radio Shack and like most of the things on the wall were just completely generic cables and accessories that I've seen in my nearby supermarket and that I see clogging up all the shelf space at the electronics department in WalMart. Just the same overpriced cheaply made stuff you can literally get in a gas station.
I know it's not like things were "right" before I saw the retail equivalent of a mass extinction event, but it sure does feel uncanny seeing masses of electonic kudzu acting as filler. That and scented candles expanding to fill the rest of whatever aisle they were in before taking over unstockable shelves all over the store like Yankee Candle is the British Empire or something. Just anything to avoid looking like you can't keep your shelves stocked.
Yeah, this is my take - things were _always bad,_ and the state of affairs in the 80s, 90s, 2000s was terrible. We should not gauge our social and cultural health by whether there are products in glossy boxes and hang-tags available by the bushel at our beck and call - _but, at least, we did have that once._ Now we don't even have that. Nobody is happy with the state of affairs. What do the rich buy? I have no idea. What is left? Other than an expensive car, what is actually satisfying? Even the luxury goods have turned to crap.
@@CathodeRayDude yeah, it's a sad state of affairs. See also: the I Am Rich app. Buying expensive things these days mostly just means some middleman somewhere made more money. There are some exceptions in industrial products and specialty high-end products (eg: supercars, crazy audiophile gear, cameras, and watches), but these are the exception, not the norm. Your rant at the end of the video resonated with me very strongly. Sorry to hear of Gibbs' passing, hope you find a new fuzzball friend to pick up the cat slack in your life.
@@CathodeRayDude they seem to buy businesses and land nowadays. Which is somehow even more depressing than a garage full of three-dozen multimillion-dollar limited-edition hypercars…
My family doctor has one in her office as her primary mouse. She uses it to save exam reports and blood work values that patients still bring on paper. I think she uses OCR to paste the results into the system. She has it for more than 6 years if I recall correctly. Have since met 2 more doctors that have that same mouse. I think it's the IRIScan executive 2.
Yeah, I get trying to finger wag for views, but he seemed unreasonably hostile at every opportunity. Considering the technical complexity, niche and price point, it's fair to say it wasn't a cash grab. Also, both mouses malfunctioning in the same way points to driver or software compatibility issues with his computer, did he even try troubleshooting the issue before labeling it "unreliable"?
@@Jun127 it's just a cheap piece of shit mate.
@@Jun127 It's the firmware from that "update".
Back in the days companies liked to INVENT new things that never existed before. Nowadays all they do is take something, change it a bit, maybe throw in some IoT and call it a revolution. Honestly in the past 20 years I cannot remember a new invention. Only upgrades to existing products. Even a smartphone is just the result of continuous improvement of PDAs and cell phones.
For me as a student in Paper-Centric German education I do see how such a product could be a lot more useful. I usually carry with me my ThinkPad X220 Tablet and a mouse. If I want to have a ''scan'' of something that I get handed out on paper I would usually have to take a picture with my phone and then send the file via Bluetooth to my Laptop. So if I could just scan the document with my mouse that would be a lot easier and faster.
Enough rambling, excellent video! Thank you for your time, effort and creativity! Greetings from Germany
EPIC roast those the last 5 minutes of this video. this channel need at least 10 times the audience.
Gravis is the best. The world needs more leftist techies.
The way it scanned the cat picture after the hardware failed looked like a Cyriak video
Well to point out the obvious, YOU'RE making something authentic, so you're very much on the right side of things here. My wife and I love your content, and our fur goblins send their condolences since they know you must be lost without your owner.
The two sensors makes a lot of sense, since that's basically required to get a good solve on both displacement and rotation. A single sensor isn't designed to (accurately?) provide rotation. Not having looked at the patent, I would assume that the single-sensor version likely has no rotation information at all (or if it does it's worse), or requires a more complex sensor.
You could fix that with software though, the camera would essentially provide the third axis.
@@TheGrinningViking That can help, but you're going to have issues on areas that don't have much variation. A mouse can track very well on a white sheet of paper, but the camera is just going to see white.
I absolutely LOVED that you can simply move the mouse any way you want until the whole document is scanned! That alone would be enough for me to buy one (or more) of these if the build quality wasn't so crappy that the thing stopped working after mere minutes.
@@noize1495 Good to know. Seems like the software is really good but the hardware is cheap crap. I wonder if that software will work on other mice ? It's taking advantage of a test mode of optical mouse sensors which functions like as camera - there are other comments on the web about using a mouse as a camera.
My condolences to you for the loss of Gibbs, and thank you for another wonderful video. Also don't worry about the time between videos, they are always worth any wait.
The "lot of fancy math" that you suspect is seriously just how optical mice do their job. This rightfully _should be_ just a slightly deranged upgrade to a normal optical mouse.
29:04 Here's a fun note: I'm watching at 2x and had to rewind several times because I was either seeing all the 'off' or all the 'on' frames. Had to go to 1x playback to see the strobe.
Same thing if you watch in 480p or lower, as that is delivered as 30fps.
Meanwhile, I'm on a high refresh rate monitor, so I see the strobe even at 2x.
huh, I just figured it was his camera that didnt actually pick up the strobe. never thought about that
Watching it at 1.5x on 90Hz breaks it in a similar way, which... makes sense in one way, but doesn't in every other. I'm confused.
@@WA_Stokins Why do I watch things at 2x speed? So I can watch more things in the time I have.
Why does watching it faster get rid of the strobe? To show a video at double speed, frames need to be discarded, depending on the refresh rate of the monitor.
You can apparently still buy those new! I found them listed as "IRIScan Mouse Executive 2", made by Dacuda and distributed by a company called Iris. It claims to support Windows 11, which I guess implies it's still being updated.
Some teachers at one of the schools where I work like these. They use them to quickly put up snippets from books on the projector. They're cheaper and more portable, though slower to use, than the document cameras some others have.
Lil, executive mouse.. Must be an insider trading joke
I don't remember the driver model changing that much from Window7 to Windows11, at least for UMD user mode drivers (which USB are)
"implies it's still being updated" It may be a stretch to say even that this implies someone got the driver to install and appear to work for a few seconds.
The silly little things like your "low-rent Louis Vuitton" really are a cherry on your already great videos; I laughed unreasonably hard at a good few of 'em lol
If the bottom sensor is covered, it is as if you're holding the lower end still, but the upper end is moving. That would only be possible if you're rotating it like you see in the scanning process.
You hit the nail on the head in regards to product development, it reminds me of all the years I spent working for start ups for various industries. I just want to make things.
Maybe a capacitor issue. It warms up, but then has an error, a common failure mode for capacitors.
I was thinking the same thing. Capacitors 'dry out' and stop working over time as their electrolyte ages. Good capacitors take decades to fail, but cheap ones only last a few years.
@@ralfmaximus4295
Or they leak electrolyte all over the board and cause havoc.
I'd think maybe it's finicky due to the power use of the thing, with 500ma usb ports
@@lasskinn474 What about interference from LED lighting that is common now that was not common back then. Another channel's video had a similar issue and when they changed to incandescent it worked. I think it was something on technology connection.
Kinda wanna buy one, seems like that failure mode would make some killer digital/analog datamangled art
You still can, ebay is full of them.
Yeah me too, I think its got potential and they are 15 quid on ebay...cheers
I was thinking the same thing when he was demoing the glitch.
RIP Gibbs 💝
I think the thought process in designing this went somewhat backwards to the way you presented it here. I think the original idea was "How about we make handheld scanning more usable by tracking location and rotation with mouse sensors?". Which honestly is a pretty decent idea, and with some more thought out algorithms I think would work very well. And as they implemented that, they thought, well, now that it has mouse sensors anyways, why not also make it be a normal mouse while we're at it? That just takes a bit of firmware, and that's it. I don't even think it was really such a fancy thing, since webcams having some kind of HID interface isn't all too unusual, though it normally is just a button or two, not a mouse.
Honestly, I think it's a real shame it's so cheaply made. If it were a decent product, I think it would actually serve some purpose. Your idea of using a phones accelerometer to track the phones location as you move it over a document might work, but I would worry that it's just not accurate enough or would require too complicated of an algorithm to be reliable, since you have to deal with much worse tracking error and somehow compensate for 3D rotation and translation, which isn't easy. With a device that only has to be tracked in two dimensions and uses more accurate sensors, you have a much easier time with the stitching.
That was my thought too. You could possibly do what the Panorama mode in the Camera app does - if you move too far forward or back, icons suggest which way to move to get back on track - but it would take some significant effort to get just right.
Interestingly, this mouse uses exactly the same logic that resulted in the development of the optical mouse sensor in the first place. That was developed when HP wanted to make a scanner that worked like one of those copier thingies you showed: you move them over the page and they scan a thing. But as this was a scanner, they wanted a way to move it into any random direction. (Note that as this was early times, the scanner uses a linear CCD.) Their solution: develop a tiny camera chip with a 'flow sensor', meaning they can process the camera image to see how they're dragged over the paper, and put them on both sides of the scanner. The scanner was called the CapShare and it obviously went absolutely nowhere, but the flow sensor thingamajigs proved very useful for other things, like optical mice...
Randomly remembering the #CueCat bundled with an issue of #Wired growing up. (Took a hiatus from social media around 2014, still not sure if I hashtag appropriately, emoji-in-my-day-they-were-called-emoticons-shrug.)
Is my T9word muscle memory applicable to any field in today’s marketplace? Do I need to join a cohort or a pod, or what even is this. #infomercialBeforeSequenceProtoMillennialRealness
That failmode is excellent, tbh makes me want to get one specifically to use that artistically
I was watching this at 2x and I wondered what you meant when you mentioned the strobing LEDs at 29:03 as they just looked turned off to me. I single-framed through and realized that they are blinking at exactly 30Hz and the discarded frames when watching at 2X just happened to be the 50% of frames where they were lit.
Recently helped my mom install her favorite embroidery software on her new laptop. The company’s website no longer mentions its existence, I had to use OTVDM to get it installed because for some reason it shipped with a 16-bit setup program… and the auto-updater works just fine.
EDIT: Forgot to mention having to manually find drivers for the USB copy protection dongle. Embroidery: serious business.
This strikes me as a device that would be useful in an alternative universe where smartphones had not been invented.
You know, business dude sales person in his hotel room scanning and emailing a freshly signed contract to HQ type of deal.
so in japan lol
@@dextrodemon Japan had smartphones in widespread use before the West, they just took a few more years to adopt touchscreen slabs because the phone keypad worked so well for kana entry. Meanwhile, unless you were a businessman with a Blackberry, the touchscreen slab was most people’s first smartphone experience over here.
Two things:
1) I miss Gibbs, even though I never met them. I'm sure they were the bestest kitty!
2) it's really weird that both mouses died in the same way! I'd love for you to find out what's going on there, if you're up for it.
I used to use that to catalogue my DVD collection. Scanning 500+ discs using the Cue Cat is far faster than typing everything one by one.
Can you elaborate? Did you scan the title on the DVD label or...?
I don't understand either. Can you explain further?
@@GoTeamScotch I scanned the UPC.
Ah, the other commenters who don’t remember what the Cue Cat was. Ignorance truly is bliss lol. Though you found a good use for the tech - most other applications for it were a right stretch!
@@kaitlyn__L it is true. Outside of cataloging my movies (and CDs, totalling more than 1,500 at that time), the Cue Cat is pointless and utterly useless. So happy to find other people remember Cue Cat !!
Dang CRD, that was a dark turn towards the end.
Maybe watch LadyAda videos, Adafruit stuff, to see the things being sold simultaneously for common needs and for the sheer joy of messing around and tinkering? Adafruit caters to the tinkering market, but their actual products are mass-market components.
Such a shame they made it on the cheap; it really is a clever idea...
Opening it up makes it seem as if it's exactly what I (or any of my coworkers) would come up as an MVP, or a Minimum Viable Product.
Close to (if not the) last prototype stage, enough that it _could_ be sold, albeit it still has room for optimization. Seems like they presented this concept to investors and either ran out of time to optimize costs further, or just downright met the goal: someone paid to make exactly _this,_ make it then. Whatever. Job done, time to go home.
It's also likely cheaper to make it with all those endless off-the-shelf modules, than to make custom parts for it, or just faster to the market. Unless you'll make many millions, custom ICs ain't gonna pay themselves, tho I do get it that this wasn't your point, rather reducing stuff like the daughterboard usage and such, or concentrate power circuitry. This part is definitely MVP/prototype tier.
I think the final, cost-reduced form might actually contain most of the same parts; I can't see how it could be done with *anything* cheaper or simpler than a pair of dirt-cheap mouse sensors, so really I'd just expect to see fewer + smaller boards, a couple hotglued components, and probably the camera and illuminator combined into a direct downwards looking module instead of the mirror box routine - I suspect that's just a gambit to get a longer focal distance and therefore FOV, but there are other ways to accomplish the same thing (fisheye lens, undistort in software)
@@CathodeRayDude how about a video on Trident video cards? They "didn't manufacture" large numbers of video cards despite their company name, logo, URL, phone number, and FCC ID numbers registered to the company being silkscreened right on the PCB. What Trident did do was make video chips and design the cards and firmware and driver software to use them. Other companies could obtain those designs when they'd purchase a load of Trident video chips.
To be extra helpful, Trident manufactured "reference design" video cards which another company could buy, un-assembled. The trick was Trident would sell a company as many "reference kits" as they wanted, from one to thousands. For most of the companies they simply just soldered together a ton of reference kits, loaded up the reference firmware, possibly swapping in their own logo to appear during POST, and shipped with the plain Trident reference drivers. Might even have swapped in their own logo and info into the installer and driver for branding without making any changes to the actual drivers.
For all of those video cards, the updated reference drivers Trident put on their website for their different chips would work.
Now comes the sneaky bit. Trident's reference firmware and software could be altered by a company so that only drivers modified by them would work with their video cards. So if they "manufactured" a Trident video card with a Windows 98 driver then either went out of business or decided not to support the card with Windows XP, the Trident reference driver for that chip for XP wouldn't work for that particular card. An especially stubborn PC owner might in some cases be able to flash the video card with the reference firmware to make it work with the reference drivers - but in some cases the "manufacturer" changed something else in the hardware to block that avenue of making the card work with versions of Windows they didn't want "their" product to work with.
But a-holery like that tended to be done mainly by the companies using Trident's reference designs as such is intended, as a reference for ensuring a product functions then making proprietary changes, designing their own PCB, submitting it for FCC testing, NOT printing all of Trident's address etc on the PCB etc. Though I do recall encountering some completely in-house designed video cards with Trident chips where the reference drivers would work.
How did I find out how this worked? By responses to emails from me asking how they could claim to "not manufacture" a ton of products that *had their name, address etc printed on them*. Someone at Trident eventually just straight up told me they'd sell anyone as many unassembled reference kits as they wanted.
Trident wasn't the only company that did this. They just did it the biggest.
There was a video card made by TriGem that used some well known non-Trident brand of video chip. The problem was that TriGem dinked around with the firmware and driver a bit then quit support for it immediately after Microsoft released the a update to Windows 95. Yup, a video card that only worked in Windows 95, no bloody, a, no bloody b... I managed to find a way to fix that. Turned out that all that was required to make it work with Win 95a was to keep *one file* from the TriGem Win 95 driver package and put it with the video chip's reference driver that supported Win 95a. I uploaded that "hacked" driver to Driverguide and for several years after I'd occasionally get a happy "Thank you!" email from some random people. No, I have no recollection of how I figured out which file nor do I remember which file it is. It has been at least 25 years.
@@greggv8 that is an absolutely remarkable tale. I don't know if it's quite my thing to cover since it's all just descriptive, but if it comes up I'll definitely have something to say about it now
@@greggv8 Sounded incredibly similar to Nvidia's system as far as I know, of selling the chips (if they actually are a middle-man selling them and not just the production rights at TSMC or whoever does the silicon) and some reference design, but then it goes haywire quickly after with the manufacturer hell.
Sadly sort-of similar stuff still happen to laptop parts.
@@greggv8 This has happened all over the place in manufacturing, in part because the way companies outsource their production make it *really* easy for the company they contract with to just subcontract the production to a another company somewhere that was already making something similar, then modify to fit (or often, "fit") the new specification.
While that *sounds* like a normal and healthy subcontracting process, what we wind up with are whole display rooms of washing machines which look totally different from each other and are made by direct competitors... but under the plastic are literally identical down to the component level.
I genuinely don't understand what's in it for the companies involved. The manufacturers are missing out on the markup the middlemen add, and any one of the middlemen with enough capital could buy the manufacturing company and cut costs while boosting revenue by selling to their competitors.
Is this what all those cut-rate products with gibberish brand names on Amazon are supposed to be, maybe?
Wow, you got me to watch a 45 minute video about a broken mouse.
Not a broken mouse, but two of them! (insert image of two little grey cats here)
The mouse/scanner idea does make sense. There are a few professions that require meeting clients on location and signing documents. If you going to bring a mouse for your laptop, it might as well have a scanner build in to scan those documents on the fly.
Regarding your closing commentary on consumer electronics, I know you weren't making a blanket statement, but I just wanted to point out that Dygma is an incredible company with a wonderfully engaging and honest communication team that designs and manufactures high-end ergonomic keyboards that are intended to be used for a very, very long time. The fact that the keyboards are pricey is a sign that the company's intention is to make money from sales of an excellent consumer product, not produce a proof-of-concept only to be bought out by a larger firm. I have been using a Dygma Raise for years, and it is the most durable, comfortable, dependable, and beautiful keyboard I have ever owned--not to mention that the software for programming the keys and layers is simple to use and not at all buggy. The most impressive thing is how they have been keeping their customers aware of every single step of the design, testing, and manufacture of their new columnar keyboard (the Dygma Defy). I wish more companies were like Dygma--passionate about their product, devoted to the details, patient with the process, clear with their communication, and focused on the very best user experience!
I like the nest thermostat analogy. I used to work installing dish network and the side effect of that job was to also sell nest products overpriced HMDI cables and soundbars. I NEVER installed a thermostat because especially where I live the HVAC specialists don't color code their wiring to existing standards, so the installation instructions were basically worthless and I didn't want to make an insurance claim and ruin a customer's day to make a sale that marginally benefited me compared to other products.
I've used one of these for the last decade or so! Mine is from a different brand, but looks kinda similar. It came with OCR software specifically aimed at banking, though. In Europe, to pay bills, you copy a long string of text from the bill into your banking web app. The software that came with the mouse was specifically designed to scan that line, OCR it, and type it into the banking site. Much faster than typing the line by hand.
I've also used the mouse to scan some pictures before phone cameras (and phone scanning apps) were good enough to make the mouse obsolete.
I've never had any issues with the mouse not working, or with its software. Of course, starting pretty much this year, bills now come with QR codes, so I don't use the mouse anymore. But it worked well enough for what it was.
loved the rant, the only additional context id add is that as you noted they immediately filed a bunch of patents, so this is still the old scam from the olden days where the company just exists to hold a bunch of patents in hopes apple or whatever someday wants to put a camera on a mouse for some reason and they can get an easy payday licensing the patent or getting a settlement out of them for a few milly. kind of surprised they actually made something, honestly, but it probably makes the patents they hold that much more valuable for having been an actual product. but that's also why it works like, exactly once. it just has to exist as proof of concept that hits the market so the patents are justified, nobody cares if it actually works. other than. you know. the suckers that bought a product expecting it to work as advertised. the fools.
also sorry to hear about gibbs :( my fianceé and several friends have had their cats pass on recently, it's rough and i'm so sorry ; ;
I especially love working on older hard drives for this reason. They're all built differently (for the most part). Heck, I worked on one from Maxtor a few months ago built entirely upside down - I opened it, saw just the platter, the head was on the other side of the drive. (Just gave up on trying to repair that one.) But past 15 years or so they've all been the same. No more huge magnets, they've figured out how to make the heads lighter thus use less neodynium and copper to move them thus spend less money...
Wish it was a bit more durable in a nicer mouse. The software is functional enough, and certainly saves a lot of space on your desk. A bit more effort both in software and hardware would make it a fantastic product.
Oh man, that old 90s Logitech branding hit me right in the nostalgia. Our very first mouse, which was a big deal at the time, was this weird 3 button Logitech thing with terrible ergonomics.
Ahh, memories. Special mouse pad with the blue stripes orthogonal to the red ones.
Thanks so much for the high quality video and commentary on this product/industry. Hope you know your content is really appreciated. RIP Gibbs
I work regularly with thousands of OCR reads daily and this is a great watch. The margin and puzzle analogy gave me a great way to explain how the system works to new people
I had an LG scanner mouse for a few months and used it for scanning and OCR-ing specific blocks of texts from a big pile of documents. It could be temperamental but generally worked well, and saved me messing about with a flatbed scanner and editing. Didn't have any use for it after the project was done, however, so it's now somewhere in the tech shed.
I still have my LG Mouse Scanner in a box here.
CRD upload? Almost 50 minutes? A seemingly-insane tech use case? This is gonna be *good.*
36:07 The programming functionality was most likely intended for stuff like webcams with physical buttons to take pictures, send e-mails, and so on - it would then make sense for the webcam chip to be able to present itself as a composite HID, as the custom manufacturer-provided code may want to eg. simulate media key presses or activate their own custom software. This would then just be a slightly unconventional use of that feature.
The whole product itself feels like a bunch of engineers and software developers genuinely tried to build a really good portable scanner, got quite far, and then suddenly were told to "hurry up and ship" by management. The software UX honestly looks quite good, if you ignore the questionable editing features!
Since it's strobing, it might be that the inrush current causes the supply of a conttoller to drop enough so it browns out(resets due to insufficient supply voltage). You could try adding a little capacitance near the controllers.
"Unfortunately it does exactly what it says on the box"
I love this
Glad you pushed through on this one. Excellent as always, though it's just plainly sad that so much brainpower and tech was spent on something clearly that exists just to be acquired. It's so rare to see someone actually want to release something for the sake of...releasing something, these days. Only thing I can think of is stuff like the MiSTer, or the retrotink, which exist to fill a hole of desperate need for a subculture.
I guess the one silver lining is people are getting pretty good at becoming their own "manufacturers" because of all the knowledge available online these days.
Loved the brutal takedown of modern startup culture! Although I can tell you not every one is like that, some are genuinely starry-eyed tech geniuses who just want to design and engineer a product, and get it to market because it's cool.
The particular one I'm thinking of is Jeri Ellsworth's Tilt Five. Genuine tech genius, brand new kind of product that's based on multiple genuinely novel patents from its founders, and only the whiff of VC funding, only as much as was necessary to get them to market through the [ongoing global situation]. Jeri's been clear she wants the company to remain independent after her experience with VC funding and the startup scene in the past. Of course, I wouldn't be surprised if she does sell, but I imagine it would be to someone who'd be a good steward for the company, like her friend Gabe from some company named "Valve".
An your rant at the end just reminded me of the avagant glyph. It's this cool sounding video glasses that projects directly into your eyes. I've seen one and it's still one of the best looking displays I've ever seen. It also was one of those Kickstarter made to basically sell out what should of been one of the best VR/AR headset technologies that's basically going nowhere with patients just going to waste. I actually bought one years later when they showed up everywhere for cheap and while the display itself seems great the whole package is a big pile of broken jank like this mouse.
Amazing analysis, and heart wrenching.
34:00 I think it's pretty obvious that it keeps track of the X/Y movement of both sensors, and that obstructing one of them acts as if you kept that point in place on the table. The reason behind the sensor orientations is probably because that's how the ICs fit inside. Also as someone that has programmed HID stuff before, you can very easily fit custom data through it, and it would also be easy to make an open source driver for it.
Dude... You are 100% correct. I took a small business class before separating from the military and the PhD-bearing instructor (some kind of business analyst with accolades such as convincing UPS to buy Mailboxes etc.) told us our main goal should be to either create a business that gets bought out or can be turned into a franchise.
Also I'll admit I teared up at the end... RIP Gibbs, long live Gibbs.
I just found your channel less than a week ago and have been almost binge watching your library. I lost my precious black cat just over a year ago, losing a pet is heartbreaking, I'm so sorry for your loss. RIP Gibbs. :(
Ladies:"He's cheating on me, isn't he?"
Men:"I need to find time to watch a 49 minute video about a mouse with a built-in scanner."
It’s like what cars were primarily in the past.
i remember seeing projects on the internet using an optical mouse as a scanner! Those were the old style ones where you could still intercept the signals going from the mouse chip to the USB chip. These days it's all integrated into one unit.
How big was the scanning area? Was it like trying to color a page solid black with a fine tip pencil?
@@DFPercush It used the mouse's own sensor which was in the area of 8x8 or 16x16 pixels. Monochrome of course.
@@nrdesign1991 right, but how much physical area did those 8 or 16 pixels cover? like, mm or inches
You've got one of the most informative channels about old tech on CZcams. Thanks for all the effort you put into these videos.
I know a couple of people that would love this. They travel a lot, and carry a portable doc scanner in their laptop bag with a mouse. This would eliminate the portable doc scanner. Taking a picture with a phone can be more finicky, more likely to be blurred or bad lighting. Would be nice if there was a version of this that didn't break immediately.
I saw one of these at a garage sale and thought that this would be a perfect item for a CRD or LGR video lol.
at least it's not that horrible as those nasty "handy scanners" of the late 1980ies. I spent too many hours of my youths life trying to scan cartoons from newspapers.
Not a bad idea.
For your question regarding the second sensors data, it’s likely bundled in with the HID device, but marked under a different feature type. The USB HID specification is extremely flexible, and allows for numerous strange combinations. Basically, each HID device registers a set of “features” with the computer, and tells it where it can go to get data for each part of the feature registered. Some of this is standardised, like with a mouse, there are standardised registers used for the mouse data itself, but you can also do all sorts of other stuff with it. For instance, I was working with an IMU unit that registers itself as an HID device, but doesn’t use a standardised method of relaying that data cause there isn’t one. Instead, it uses the HID protocol to tell the computer where the command and device descriptor are, then relies on a custom driver to set up the rest of the device. It is likely that the mouse here has a mouse feature, and then a custom feature that relays either the data from the other sensor, or the calculated rotation and position data to the computer. Windows uses the mouse, the software taps into the driver and uses the other feature. I’m a bit rusty on this cause USB HID is also a very dense standard, but I think my general understanding is correct.
Also, as for the multiple USB chips, USB in general has ways to deal with that. Basically, the main chip used would act as a hub, and the rest would be just like plugging in multiple USB devices to a hub. They may have used a different method, but this would be the most straightforward. You see this with internal USB hubs used on laptops to connect things like SD card readers and touchpads. Each chip gets its own address alongside the vendor ID, which avoids address collisions, so they can just be independently addressed and show up on the computer acting independently. Again, same disclaimer as above, working off of slightly fuzzy memories of the whole thing.
Addendum to the above, since you addressed the hub concept. A USB composite device is as best I can tell, a purely software implemented device. On both Linux and Windows the documentation relating to composite devices talks about drivers as opposed to the USB spec. So I’m guessing they’ve avoided a hub, and instead rely on the driver to address each chip correctly. The unmarked chip could be doing a basic USB interface, or it might be a built in hardware feature of it. Hard to know without finding the data sheet.
Yet another addendum. The likely reason you can’t find any large format scanning apps for android is that doing dead reckoning with a phone accelerometer and gyroscope is basically a non-starter. AR stuff works, but it utilises a lot of visual data to correct for the constant drift in the accelerometer, and the computer vision used is not able to gather much context when pointed at a piece of paper. It may even get confused if pointed at an image without sufficient context clues and regard it as 3D if the phone used lacked depth sensing capabilities. The biggest issue arises from the fact that there is no good way to zero out the acceleration noise picked up due to the movement of the planet and gravity without spending a lot of money on a fancy GPS setup that sends correction data specific to the local region. I looked into it for a project on a large scale photogrammetry application using a cheap add on to a camera, and it just wasn’t feasible with current MEMS sensors.
I have a project that I reverse engineer Wacom I2C digitizer and reuse it with Teensy MCU and nRF51822 (BLE mcu). All I have to say is that USB is really convenience to user, but designing this from ground up (I wrote my own HID descriptor) is real pain. USB HID is complicated (at least to beginner) but ir's versatile. It's probable the cheapest way to send data to your PC since you don't need to write your own driver, just HID api call.
the USB composite device reminds me how I used to often wish USB devices included a small chunk of read only memory to include drivers onboard. they'd almost always be out of date, but so were driver disks and this would be less likely to get lost
The issue with that is it makes it even easier to have malware delivered via USB devices, you don't even need to pretend to be a keyboard, you can just ship some 'drivers'.
@@ChiefArug oh for sure, this was when I was like 9yo; it's not a great idea
I had a handy-scanner for my c64. In GEOS you could do miracles with this thing.
I'm just starting this video, and I'm going to call out that this would be useful for business travel. Scanning those Receipts while travelling to continue pushing the ever turning wheels of capitalism forward.
I’ve been rewatching a bunch of your old videos. Thanks for the upload, great quality as always
I strongly suspect that the dual mouse sensors are used to track rotation in scanning mode. 2 points on a plane with XY movement info each let you infer the rotation between of the plane. This is confirmed by your test where you block one sensor: the mouse will start rotating around that sensor (since one sensor standing still and one moving to the side would usually mean a rotation around one sensor).
I love this. I had an idea like this this idea since I found out that mouse sensors are just like tiny bad cameras a few years ago, and I'm happy to see that this has already been made and works quite well (until something breaks and it looses tracking)
I live for subtle Two of Them's
I need a shirt with the cats and the phrase printed in them. I mean two shirts of course.
wasn't expecting a commentary on late stage capitalism but thanks anyway. another banger, another banger by gravis from crd
From the title of this video, I thought this would be about a computer mouse with an integrated barcode scanner. I never thought it would contain a document scanner!
A great vid. I hope that things feel better for you soon. I've been there myself, and it can take time... but we'll all be here cheering for you :)
Cool tech, badly implemented.
Id love a product that did this reliably.
Actually, even at the end of 2012, phone cameras were ok enough to take decent copies of documents. My mum went to the US (we live in Australia) and were in the middle of applying for a new rental property. I emailed her the rental contract, she had the hotel print it, she signed it, took photos and sent them back to me. I did a quick crop, perspective and contrast edit to make it look more like a scan and it was actually pretty convincing. The realestate had no issues with it at all.
EDIT: Just got to the end of the video 😭 I'm sorry, man. It always hurts losing a pet. Stay strong. You're in my thoughts.
I am so sorry for the loss of your cat. Our animal companions bring so much into our lives and leave such a huge hole when they are gone. My deepest sympathy.
I really appreciate how you treat your veiwers with respect. You arent a shallow channel and you veer from shallow things.
My condolences, my cat passed away this week as well. Thank you so much for making what you do
If it worked I could see a use for this 10+ years ago.
I worked in hardware and our shipping and receiving department had to scan the labels on boxes and enter them into the computer. They used those hand held wand scanners you showed at the start of the video. They worked but as someone who had to support that thing I had calls every time the cord failed, the battery died, SD card malfunctioned or just got lost.
I like the mouse idea because when they scanned it would go right into the computer, that would eliminate the SD card, transfer cable issues, battery issue and since it was connected to the computer at all time, help it from getting lost.
After a while the camera on tables and phones got good enough for their needs and they scanned changed to that.
I absolutely love the concept. I have to scan and e-mail receipts fairly regularly at work.
This means right now taking a picture of the receipt with my phone, saving it on drive, downloading it, and then adding it as an attachment in the e-mail (together with some other attachments).
Scanning it, saving it on the PC and attaching it seems like a much more convenient workflow.
But i don't feel like putting a whole flatbed scanner on my desk just for the receipts.
All in one scan/print things usually suck.
Eh, if you can put a piece of A4 down on the desk, you can put a flatbed scanner there. Leave your papers on top of it when you're not scanning anything.
Love your indictment of modern design trends. How do you make fast money? Make a scan. How do you make consistent (and much more) money? Make a useful product.
Nobody's answering "why" anymore. "Cuz" they say.
Oh, I knew someone who had one of these. They were a notary public. They traveled to paper signings usually for home loans. Fun walk down memory lane.
the two sensors are to provide rotational data for the mouse. the "off the shelf" mouse sensors give positional data, but not rotational data. one point can define translation, two points can define rotation. the one sensor design would have required a custom chip to process rotational and translational data.
The realest most depressing ending.
Make a whole video on it so I can be sadder please.
LOL @ "These devices were born to be E waste. The production line should have ended in a landfill." That is one of the funniest things ive ever heard on here! 😆😆😆 So true!
I'd used several hand-scanners in the 80s and 90s, and one thing that bugged me about every one I ever used: They had a single cylindrical rubber "tire" that ran most of the width of the device. Theoretically, this was supposed to keep the scanner moving in a consistent straight line. In reality, they still allowed the scanner to twist as it was being pulled along. I always thought what would have been better was a narrow tire on each side fixed to a common axle. This would provide only two points of contact with the scanned surface, rather than an infinite number of points around which it could pivot.
Despite everything, I did love this video. Thank you for your impassioned rant at the end and insightful deconstruction on this whimsically mundane piece of tech.
Mad props for doing possibly way too much work to make that overhead scanner shot look like it was actually on your desk by editing it so your hands appeared where they "should" while interacting with it, that's some high effort video production :)
Oof that ending speech, ain't that the friggin truth
And RIP Gibbs 😭😭😭
When I was a kid and saw the new optical mice and handheld scanners, I thought that it'd be a great combo device.