"How do Optical Mice Work"

Optical Mouse was First Developed by Agilent Technologies and introduced to the world in late 1999, the optical mouse actually uses a tiny camera to take 1,500 pictures every second. Able to work on almost any surface, the mouse has a small, red light-emitting diode (LED) that bounces light off that surface onto a complementary metal-oxide semiconductor (CMOS) sensor.


Definition of an Optical Mouse :-
An optical mouse is an advanced computer pointing device that uses a light-emitting diode (LED ), an optical sensor, and digital signal processing ( DSP ) in place of the traditionalmouse ball and electromechanical transducer. Movement is detected by sensing changes in reflected light, rather than by interpreting the motion of a rolling sphere.


Working :-
The CMOS sensor sends each image to a digital signal processor (DSP) for analysis. The DSP, operating at 18 MIPS (million instructions per second), is able to detect patterns in the images and see how those patterns have moved since the previous image. Based on the change in patterns over a sequence of images, the DSP determines how far the mouse has moved and sends the corresponding coordinates to the computer. The computer moves the cursor on the screen based on the coordinates received from the mouse. This happens hundreds of times each second, making the cursor appear to move very smoothly.

Types of Optical Mice :-


1 LED Mice
Optical mice often use LEDs for illumination, even though they are sometimes colloquially referred to as 'lasers'. The color of the optical mouse's light-emitting diodes can vary, but red is most common, as red diodes are inexpensive and silicon photodetectors are very sensitive to red light.[10] Other colors are sometimes used, such as the blue LED of the V-Mouse VM-101 illustrated at right.


2 LASER MICE
The laser mouse uses an infrared laser diode instead of a LED to illuminate the surface beneath their sensor. As early as 1998, Sun Microsystems provided a laser mouse with their Sun SPARCstation servers and workstations.However, laser mice did not enter the mainstream market until 2004, when Paul Machin at Logitech, in partnership with Agilent Technologies, introduced its MX 1000 laser mouse.This mouse uses a small infrared laser instead of a LED and has significantly increased the resolution of the image taken by the mouse. The laser enables around 20 times more surface tracking power to the surface features used for navigation compared to conventional optical mice.
Glass laser (or glaser) mice have the same capability of a laser mouse but can also be used on top of mirror or transparent glass with few problems.


Benefits :-
1. No moving parts means less wear and a lower chance of failure.
2.There's no way for dirt to get inside the mouse and interfere with the tracking sensors.
3. Increased tracking resolution means smoother response. 
4.They don't require a special surface, such as a mouse pad.



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