Raspberry Pi Pico Powered 3D Mouse is Ready for Input

If you want something in life, sometimes you just have to make it. Nobody knows that better than developer Daniël van Belzen. Instead of purchasing a pre-built 3D mouse; he’s opted to create his own from scratch with a little help from our favorite microprocessor, the Raspberry Pi’s RP2040. If you haven’t heard of a 3D mouse before, these are used for manipulating 3D objects in various CAD applications.

This isn’t Belzen’s first Raspberry Pi project and it shows. A quick look through his GitHub history reveals a previous Pi project; that involved the creation of a custom camera GUI called Pi Vision; which adds a selection of control options to the official Raspberry Pi camera module.

According to Belzen, the idea for a custom SpaceMouse had been cooking up for a while but it took some time to sort out the logistics of the design and obtain the necessary hardware. Most of the housing is 3D-printed from designs he made in Fusion 360. The end result is a custom 3D mouse with a joystick and multiple rotary encoders.

Instead of using a full-on Raspberry Pi model, this project is built around Pimoroni’s Tiny 2040 board. This board shares the same RP2040 SoC as the Raspberry Pi Pico but in a much smaller form factor, better-suited for Belzen’s project. the Space Mouse project also includes an SSD1306 OLED display that can be used for all sorts of data output options.

Read more: https://www.tomshardware.com/news/raspberry-pi-pico-3d-mouse