🚀 go-pugleaf

Hello Remy,

I will try your suggestions over the weekend...

You asked why I would want to do this.  I'm afraid it is a 
rather lengthy answer...

I teach several courses at UCLA in computer simulation, for
students who mostly have had no previous programming
experience. The flagship course is "ALiCE - Artificial Life,
Culture and Evolution." These courses are part of our new
Human Complex Systems program, and I recently won a teaching
award for the flagship course - my "innovation" was "teaching
students how to REASON with technology." For more, please
visit my website: http://gessler.bol.ucla.edu

When I teach to Arts students, we use an EZIO AD/DA board 
and interface our software with the real world. Because that
board is cumbersome to demonstrate in a classroom setting,
I'd like to experiment with other alternatives for simple AD
converters.  

The mouse is one such device, and I was hoping to sacrifice
a few of them by taking them apart, and in the case of roller
ball mice, physically connecting the rollers to processes in
the real world.  In that case I'd control the software from 
the keyboard and use the mouse in a way it was not intended
to be used: as a movement sensor, or pair of movement sensors.
With the optical mice, I'm sure I could do something similar.

So I would want to be able to input an endless and seamless 
stream of data from the re-purposed mouse.  I would use the 
mouse-move event to collect the data. However, the data stream
would be interrupted when the cursor hit the edge of the 
window.  If I can reset the position of the cursor under
program control, I could then reset the cursor when this
happens and with code I could reconstruct a steady stream of
data.

I would love to buy ready-to-use plug-in USB AD/DA devices for
everyone in my class, but as a Lecturer, I cannot afford to
do that. So I was hoping to be able to repurpose a bunch of 
mice to do this.

Thanks, Nick
Nick Gessler, Ph.D.
UCLA Human Complex Systems Program