3d mouse help regarding imu and xbee

Forum 2005-2010 (read only) Hardware Interfacing
1

i am planning to do a 3d mouse as my final year project and i have some doubts in it! ( as i could not post links in my first post i am posting the detailed question in the following post- please excuse )
thank you.

2

i am thinking of making an 3d mouse glove and i thought of having two xbee modules (XBee 1mW Chip Antenna - Series 1 (802.15.4) - WRL-08664 - SparkFun Electronics) one of them connected to imu (IMU Analog Combo Board Razor - 6DOF Ultra-Thin IMU - SEN-10010 - SparkFun Electronics) and the other connected to arduino mega 2560.

i have some questions on this,

  1. is that imu board suitable with xbee that is would the xbee be able to transmit all the data on the imu board( it has 12 outputs which need to be transmitted )

  2. is arduino mega okay or any other board like uno is enough?

  3. do i need to buy xbee explorer dongle to configure xbee or can it be done by the arduino itself?

i am a newbie to this and i had taken this up as my final year project please help.

3

it has 12 outputs

I see pitch, roll, yaw, and x, y, & z axis accelerometer data. Where did you get 12 outputs?

The XBee has 6 analog inputs and 8 digital input/output pins.

is arduino mega okay or any other board like uno is enough?

There is nothing on the Arduino that is controlled by a mouse (2D or 3D), so it isn't clear what the Arduino will be doing, or why one is needed at all.

do i need to buy xbee explorer dongle to configure xbee or can it be done by the arduino itself?

With a shield, and without the ATMega chip in place, the brainless Arduino can be used to configure the XBees. If you are using an Arduino without a removable chip, like the Mega, then you need the explorer.

If the only thing that the Arduino is doing is acting as a carrier for the XBee, and feeding input from the XBee to a PC, skip the Arduino altogether, and just get the explorer.

The Arduino, when connected to the PC, will not appear to the computer as a mouse. This might have an impact on your project.

4

thanks for the info.

but i still see there are (x,y,z) data grouped into three ports like for 1acc (x,y,z) 2nd acc (x,y,z) 3rd acc(x,y,z) thus making nine terminal pins plus three other for gyro and some other data making 12.( please clarify)

i thought that the acc data can be used as input to some java program to emulate mouse! is it possible? i don have any idea just guessing.

5

An accelerometer measures the rate that something is moving at. It has a magnitude (a value) that represents the acceleration in a given direction (along X, along Y, or along Z). It does not output 3 values.

i thought that the acc data can be used as input to some java program

It could.

to emulate mouse!

This is the tricky part. A mouse is generally polled by the computer. There is a specific protocol that needs to be implemented to make an application respond as a mouse. Mouse drivers do it, so it can be done. It is not trivial, though.

Most applications that need mouse input do not expect Z data to be available, so a general mouse driver is not going to be all that useful. A specific 3D driver would need to be integrated with whatever application is going to be using the mouse data.

6

thanks a lot i read on what you just mentioned and found that to make something like that to work we need some ps2 driver and it is hard to work with it seems.

thanks a lot it indeed turned out to be a good idea to post the idea before buying the components you just saved me a lot of money thanks.