If you aren't following Simone Giertz on YouTube, you should be. The Swedish inventor has taken the Web by storm with fabulous creations that have a habit of failing catastrophically. For her latest project, she recruited another inventor YouTuber, William Osman, and together they created the world's largest computer mouse… which involves a generic mouse stuck to the bumper of Simone's car.
Simone Giertz and Her Impossible Inventions
A robot alarm clock that hits her out of bed. A vegetable cutter that destroys whatever it touches. Robots for breakfast, applying lipstick, brushing teeth, eating soup... one way or another, the inventor behind these gadgets always ends up dazed, dirty, surprised, or all three at once. Simone Giertz has just over sixty videos on her channel, but her 900,000 YouTube followers say everything about her popularity. The latest project she published involves her odd car. It's a Comuta-Car, an electric vehicle designed in the '70s by Sebring-Vanguard in response to the oil crisis, which she named Cheese Louise because it looks like a piece of cheese.
What did she do with Cheese Louise? She turned it into a computer mouse. The biggest computer mouse ever seen. But Simone didn't do it alone; she joined forces with William Osman, who from a certain point of view did the heavy lifting, first modifying a generic PS/2 mouse with a new lens, and then programming an Arduino Pro Micro to act as a controller. The problem is that the mouse would only register vertical and horizontal movements even when the car is turning, so it needed the assistance of a magnetometer. The mouse's primary click was connected to Cheese Louise's horn.
How did it work? Horrible, of course. The plan was to drive to create a sort of portrait in Photoshop, but after the controller hung twice, all they managed to make was a yellow triangle. Regardless, this deserves your time.
