#mouse tracker

[shark-king-puppii]

hackin into his heart again~ >.<

Watch this video on Twitch Live

then drawin cuz we got shit to do babes

[storieslc]

Your privacy matters to me

Stories LC only has 1 basic tracker for basic metrics. If you go there with Ghostery, you’ll see a 0 beside the Ghost. (hi Ghost!)

I don’t track your mouse movements, other website visits, anything like that, and I try to hold as little personal information as possible. Some stuff’s fun to see (I keep track of when you signed up for the site), your page number (so that you have a bookmark to other pages), the latest page you’ve reached, but even then, if you learn that I’m holding onto any info that you’re not comfortable with me holding onto, let me know!

When you make an account on the site, I just need your email address. Nothing else. No name, no password, nothin’.

My privacy matters to me. So your privacy matters to me.

Though I agree in creating the best user experience possible and know that understanding your use can help me create a better one, I view privacy as a part of user experience.

So yeah...

...there’s ma spiel.

Go eat hot dogs.

[tymkrs]

Mouse Tracker v1.0

So before I was a nurse, I was a behavioral neuroscientist and I worked with a lot of mouse models of different types of addictions and disorders.  To test any behavioral changes, we use a number of tests - one of which is the "Open Field".  All it is an open box where scientists track how much time the mouse spends in different quadrants and regions of that field.

So we've always wanted to make one for ourselves.  The ones that the best labs pay for often use camera tracking, but that can sometimes be faulty because the mouse needs to have enough contrast from the box in order for the software to pick it up to record the data.

So we decided, why not use capacitive touch?

I noticed Whisker making some sort of LED thing that lit up when you touched a wire connected to the circuit.  So I asked him if a mouse would have enough capacitance to make an LED light up.

We took a copper clad PCB board, scored lines into it dividing it into a grid.  Drilled a wire-sized hole in the center of each of the grid squares and drilled the subsequent holes in the bottom of the tupperware box it's sitting in.

That wire would be connected to the base lead of a NPN transistor, in our case we used a 2N3904.  The emitter lead is connected to ground and the collector lead is connected to the negative lead of a LED.

So because we had 24 grid squares, we had 24 wires leading to 24 NPN transistors which were hooked to 24 LEDs.  Then I chose the fattest mouse I could (because the small mice were too small), and let it run around.

For the most part it works, but the capacitance that mice are able to provide is pretty minimal.  And it seems like the pcb board itself occasionally picks up some RF/interference.  So Whisker's thinking of optimizing it and making it transmit digital data instead of just visual!

EDIT: Seems someone says that we're not actually using capacitance, but are in fact picking up interference.  Whichever :p, mouse interference tracker?

@atdiy/@tymkrs