DIY laser-controlled keyboard

John Biggs

Biggs is the East Coast Editor of TechCrunch. Biggs has written for the New York Times, InSync, USA Weekend, Popular Mechanics, Popular Science, Money and a number of other outlets on technology and wristwatches. He is the former editor-in-chief of Gizmodo.com and lives in Bay Ridge, Brooklyn. You can Tweet him here and G+ him here. Email him directly at... → Learn More

Sunday, July 12th, 2009

laser_pointer_th
This is a wacky little project. Basically you train a webcam to follow a spot on a piece of paper. Then you set “hotspots” on the image and assign commands to each hotspot. When you aim at the spot you basically “press” a button.

Why would this be useful? You could potentially create a presentation system with this or help a handicapped person type with it. It’s also really cool. The whole project includes source code for Linux.

Laserspotcam is a software I wrote to control xmms using a laser pointer by pointing defined areas on a wall.

The software monitors the wall for the presence of a small spot using a webcam. When the spot appears somewhere, if it is inside a defined hotspot, the appropriate command is executed.

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