Memos From the Cube

Two days ago I received in the mail a nice shiny new toy, courtesy of Sean D’Epagnier over at www.digitalsurveyinstruments.com – a new magnetometer/pointer device. Powered by MyUSB, this little critter can serve either as a “3D mouse”, where the computer’s mouse pointer moves according to the rotation of the device, or as a magnetometer sensor which can collect readings for curiosity, amusement and (possibly) legitemate survey uses.

The design and quality of the device is top-notch, and it’s a blast to play with – although not without the occasional bug as the system is still in development. I’m quite excited to play with a real, proper design made from MyUSB, and all the more excited about just how damn neat the thing is.

Sean’s been busy working on both this and the larger, full magnetometer design, with mountains of firmware to dig through on his site along with schematics, documentation and a host-side communication program. Following the lead of other designers the unit can be put into CDC mode, enumerating as a virtual serial port for terminal-like control over the settings and status of the device through either Sean’s custom program, or through a standard serial terminal. This flexibility allows other software to interact with the device easily through standard serial APIs, which makes porting or creating compatible programs a much easier task than a custom USB interface with custom driver would afford.

I haven’t had much of a chance to really play with this thing yet other than use it to control my mouse and surf the web, so it’s going to be a fun couple of days.