ARM Community: ARM Powered Mouse Takes the Cheese - ARM Community

I keep an eye on press releases that mention ARM and one that caught my eye a few weeks ago was from a great company called SteelSeries; they build products for dedicated gaming enthusiasts. The release announced their latest mouse, the Sensei:


As the title says, this is the sort of device that, a few years ago, you may never have thought of as something that would need an ARM® processor. But as with many other products that embody a sensor they are rapidly becoming more intelligent.

This little beast embeds inside it an ARM Cortex™-M3 processor-based STMicroelectronics STM32 MCU and I gave a call to Tino Soelberg, the CTO of SteelSeries, to find out a bit more about it. He was kind enough to chat about the clever new features they have been able to build in to give the gamer far more control than they ever thought possible.

In talking about a mouse, something I didn’t realise but quickly learnt from Tino is how different each model can feel to an experienced user. Your average mouse does little more than take the sensor data and stream it to the PC; the Sensei certainly does not! Tino likened the control on offer to the graphic equaliser curves on your hifi, giving you the ability to tune the mouse to exactly how you want it to be. Rather than pass the sensor data through “raw” the MCU is now constantly processing the data stream, adapting it for acceleration and inversion, the precise resolution (up to 11400 cpi with all of the interpolation built into the mouse) needed, and so on.

One of the neatest things that I had never dreamed of and yet really frustrates me in a normal mouse is line drawing. Tino explained to me how the Sensei can straighten out lines at all manner of angles for you automatically if you want it to. Very smart!

There are some really nice videos that talk about the product on their website; I like them since they focus on the user and what they care about:



As I talked to Tino it occurred to me that this is another good example of intelligent sensors. So many sensors, from mice to giros in a car to tilt sensors in your phone, used to be quite dumb. Now the reverse is true with intelligence embedded inside them to adapt and process the data before it leaves the device. SteelSeries have taken that concept and built it into their latest products.

We can buy these mice in a few weeks time. I’m not a gamer, I’m a little past that now, but the features still seem to be worth a try and the idea of an ARM Powered mouse is too good to pass up!

Richard York is a senior program manager in the ARM processor division with responsibility for the marketing of all ARM’s embedded and microcontroller CPU products including the Cortex-M and Cortex-R series. He is also responsible for the overall embedded roadmap for these products and also for specialized derivatives such as the ARM SecurCore processor family. He has worked at ARM for over thirteen years, during which time he has been closely involved with the design of ARM7TDMI core and was an architect in ARM’s advanced research and development group. He is also the principal architect of the ARM RealTrace debug system.

Before joining ARM Richard worked in the Amulet group at the University of Manchester, researching asynchronous implementations of the ARM architecture.