I built this device as an affordable single switch mouse replacement for increased computer access for individuals with disabilities. It’s a customizable alternative to some built-in OS accessibility features. Since it’s a hardware based mouse emulator it will work with any OS without modification: Windows, Mac, Linux, etc. You can plug your accessibility switch into the switch jack and with that switch alone you can move the mouse pointer around and perform left click, right click, or double click. The speed and other features can be tuned for the individual. Here’s a video of it in use:

The method presented here works pretty well. But since it’s fully implemented in code running on a microcontroller, it’s pretty easy to customize anything about it including the pointer movement speed, the delay required for different actions (left, right, and double clicks), and the order of different actions. Completely different schemes are also possible. My aim in this project is to both provide one version of a solution and also to remind people how easy it can be to create a completely custom mouse device. The device, coding and tweaking were completed within an hour.

I may do a quick update of this project just to show a more physically robust version inside a plastic enclosure but I wanted to get this out there sooner rather than later. For now you can directly see how it’s wired up, just an Arduino Micro, an OLED display, a switch jack with inline resistor, and an enable slide switch.

  

You can grab the code I wrote for this device here: https://github.com/bobparadiso/SingleSwitchMouseControl