Watch a 1980s electric car transform into the world’s largest computer mouse

Thomas McMullan Read more February 22, 2018

A bright yellow Comuta-car is a strange sight on its own terms, but a pair of YouTubers has given the 1980s electric vehicle an even more unique overhaul – turning it into an enormous computer mouse.

The car, dubbed “Cheese Louise”, is owned by Simone Giertz, who you might have come across before thanks to her “shitty robots”. The person turning the car into an oversized peripheral is William Osman, who also films himself on YouTube getting up to all sorts with soldering irons.

Tape an optical mouse onto the bumper and that’s that, you might think. It’s not quite as straightforward as that, though, with Osman needing to compensate for the fact a computer mouse would only record a vertical movement – you don’t tend to move a car sideways, unless you’re drifting… or crashing.

To get around this, he attached a mouse to an Arduino Pro along with an HMC5883 magnetometer, which was able to act like a compass and tell the system which direction the car is facing. He also fitted a new lens to the mouse, so that it could pick up movement more than a few inches away. In a nice touch, the mouse click was connected to the car’s horn.

The results are entertaining, if not the most elegant solution to simple tasks like sending emails. It takes Giertz and Osman a good few minutes just to type ‘Hi’, and they almost run down a group of skaters in the process. Next up, a point and click adventure game on the M25 using a Morris Minor.

In more Youtubers-making-fun-but-crap-tech news, someone decided to go ahead and make a terrifying organ from 44 Furbies. Someone else wrangled 64 floppy disks to perform Toto’s Africa, but that isn’t crap in the slightest.

Image credit: William Osman