If you're into hobbyist robotics or just want to keep track of your Roomba progress you may be interested in John Graham-Cumming's conversion of an inexpensive optical mouse into a robot odometer.

In this tutorial, I will show how you can handle the optical sensor inside a cheap optical-mouse for your next microcontroller project. Hope, this will allow your preferred microcontroller to look at ...

Wanting to experiment with using optical mouse sensors but a bit frustrated with the lack of options, [Tom Wiggins] rolled his own breakout board for the ADNS 3050 optical mouse sensor and in the ...