Acquiring High resolution data from usb mouse movement

Question

Is there a way of acquiring high resolution data from the movement of a usb mouse?  I have a NI PCI 6221 daq card to use. I have a Pentium 4 PC with 1 Gb of RAM. I need to get the position, velocity and acceleration of the mouse.
Is there a way to do it with the above hardware.
Thanks in advance

Answer 1

I don't see how you could use a PCI-6221 to get high resolution mouse movement measurements. The PCI-6221 can acquire voltages at up to 250kS/s, but what voltage would you measure? It could also read in digital data at 1MHz, but you would have to be able to understand the USB communication protocol your mouse uses, and I doubt that your mouse vendor will give out that information. You might be able to take your mouse apart and hook up leads to the sensors around the trackball and do a sort of quadrature encoder application, but there's no guarantee we're dealing with TTL digital signals here (you might even be using an optical mouse!).
Your best option - and I have no idea how good this option is - is to use the driver already installed for your usb mouse. What software application are you going to use to program your application that will measure the mouse movements?
If you would consider using LabVIEW, you could set up an event structure to capture mouse movements across the front panel. Each event registered includes a timestamp from the CPU's millisecond clock as well as the coordinates of the mouse. If you stored up a buffer of previous mouse positions and times, you could infer a velocity, perhaps with the help of interpolation functions.
All of this would have somewhere on the level of millisecond timing accuracy. Were you envisioning something else?
Jarrod S.
National Instruments