How does an optical mouse work?

How does an optical mouse work?

Optical mice developed by “Agilent Technologies” and introduced to the world in late 1999. The works of optical mouse is given below:-

1. The optical mouse actually uses a tiny camera to take thousands of pictures every second. It’s also able to work on almost any surface without a mouse pad.

2. Most optical mice use a small, red light-emitting diode that bounces light off that surface onto a complimentary metal-oxide semiconductor (CMOS) sensor. This results in the ability to use a laser-based optical mouse on even more surfaces than an LED mouse.

3. The CMOS sensor sends each image to a digital signal processor (DSP) for analysis. The DSP detects patterns in the images and examines how the patterns have moved since the previous image.

 4. 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.

5. 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.