Amazing. I'm glad you don't ship outside of the US 'cause I would be insanely tempted to buy this completely superfluous gadget. Love everything about it, from the idea and its negative utility to design and materials.
Are there any details available? Dimensions, charging, etc?
Actually, this can be used as a presentation clicker, right? There you go, business expense.
I looked at my site analytics and realized this is where it was coming from :-o
I should turn on international shipment, but Stripe doesn't support auto calculate rates. CNC machined from aluminum. USB C. I did test it with powerpoint just now, works!
I noticed you've been adding additional information in response to many comments, which led me to believe you might be the creator of this doomscroller. However, I didn't see any mention of you being the author.
Typically, on Hacker News, when the original poster is not the author and the author discovers that one of their works is trending, they promptly join the discussion, usually starting with "author here.."
This isn't a strict rule but more of a best practice or convention.
I really like imagining how people of the future (like hundreds of years in the future) looking at our current culture and technology will try to interpret things that I seem to get without thinking. Like, if they dug up my home and found this thing sitting in a drawer what kind of wild theories would they come up before they eventually realized, "This human valued something that actually did less than nothing."
I mean, usually when archeologists don't understand a device they just end up chucking it in the "religious device" bin. Not that would exactly be wrong here, but you know.
A ratchet that physically prevents reversing, but still have the firmware support reverse scrolling. I love the idea of a digital product that if broken in just the right way behaves as expected given intuition from the physical world.
The best thing about such a rachet would be that it could still allow a tiny amount of scrolling. Just enough for the user to know that it could scroll up... if the lock didn't kick in
Oh God that's delicious. I just love the idea of physical limitations to software options. So often it's the other way around. I can physically see the path or even map a solution but the software doesn't help.
There’s a lot to do with the general idea. I’ve enjoyed thinking about a garage door opener that uses 4G to open your garage door from anywhere in the world. Technically correct but worse than before!
Or if it had a mood sensor, and scrolled >>rapidly<< downwards if distress detected, with the logic that the user would never be satisfied with the amount of dopamine generated from any amount of doomscrolling performed.
I'd love if my cellphone had a lateral button like old portable radios had to adjust the volume but with the sole purpose of scrolling. Scrolling on the screen is annoying, my finger covers the content and I must be careful not to click something. I really can't believe I'm the only one desiring such a thing.
Oh man, these looked so awesome. I miss these phones sometimes. There was something cool about seeing what features different phones had. Nowadays, it's basically iOS vs Android, where both OSes do pretty much the same things, and it's all about the apps.
Sony had these on their Clié (Palm OS) devices as well.
I’ve only ever had first-party Palm handhelds, but the scroll wheel (Sony had some nifty name which is eluding me) always seemed very appealing for single-handed use.
I had a SonyEricsson P800 (the first of that series) and it had the same wheel, but IIRC was plastic made (just like the rest of the phone). Oh man I was barely 20yo back then and I feel bad for the hype I had while waiting the phone to actually come out and buy it. I also remember I paid an insane amount of money for it, which then became standard a few years later thanks to Apple.
The Blackberry 7100t had a side scroll/job wheel like this along with a body narrower than other blackberries thanks to its 20 key qwerty-ish keyboard (2 characters per key). It still ranks as one of my favorite mobile devices. Great ergonomics paired with just enough web browsing capability to be helpful during emergencies; I would spend my morning Metro ride touch typing email drafts on it. It had its flaws of course, but the side jog wheel and narrow physical keyboard added up a “spark” of feeling like it was on to something.
Non sequitur: Another long forgotten device that still bounces into my thoughts every so often is the Psion REVO. 8MB RAM, 36MHz ARM processor, and full QWERTY keyboard that fit into your (back) pocket —- better paper specs than the hand-me-down 386sx I was using a few years before! One of these days I’ll dig though storage and see if I can resurrect it.
> I always wondered if one could repurpose side-mounted fingerprint sensors (ex. Samsung Galaxy Fold) as a swipe-to-scroll mechanism.
Given how fp sensors are capacitive, this should totally be doable. Several phones (including my pixel 5) allow using rear fp sensors for opening/closing the notification shade.
> "chiral scroll"
Aah.. I miss that on my framework laptop. I had it on my old HP ProBook in the Synaptics settings. Chiral and (1 finger) edge scrolling were amazing. I'd suggest using ZMK/QMK and a touchpad from mouser if anyone wants to DIY one today.
My last Samsung with a back-mounted fingerprint sensor (A40) could do that (there was an option in the settings to enable scrolling with the fingerprint sensor).
I'd love something like that. But I would want that to have tactice clicks, like mouse scrolling wheels, so that it can also be used for paging in book readers.
Which speaking of, there is a niche there for a product that I think is actually realistically doable at small scale. On Android, most book readers can be configured to flip pages with volume up/down, which is extremely convenient for one-handed reading. No such luck on iOS, though, where those buttons cannot be taken over by apps. It would be nice to have some kind of case for iPhones that incorporated dedicated page up/down buttons along those lines, just connecting to the actual phone via Bluetooth and presenting itself as a keyboard.
I would assume it'd also work with literal Page Up/Down keys, however that is exposed for keyboards when using Bluetooth. The important part is having that on the phone itself, placed such that when you hold it with one hand, the thumb is conveniently placed on the page down key, so that one only needs to push slightly to flip to the next page. That's what makes Android phones so convenient for reading over long periods of time compared to iPhones, where you have to lift the thumb and tap the screen for every page.
My samsung phone has the fingerprint scanner in the side power button (the only location that makes sense, IMHO). Software should be able to read gestures from this same sensor, no?
edit: Sorry, thinking out loud. A quick Google search confirms that my phone already has this feature in settings. Unfortunately, the gesture is mapped to showing/hiding the notification panel, instead of screen scrolling.
Some old (pre-smart, pre-camera, chunky ones with small B&W LCD screens) cell phones had a side scrollwheel that was used for menu navigation. I think it was clickable too.
The only more modern take on that that I know of was Marshall's "audiophile" Android phone [0] from 2015, which had a side scrollwheel for volume, but not sure if it was used for navigation.
My first cellphone (Sony) had this. I think it was https://images.app.goo.gl/Xc1RtzQSurxcFktt7
I even wonder if there wasn't haptic feedback. It was so cool at the time and I still miss it.
The dials on all the "medium-end" digital cameras I've owned always worked reliably despite many years of regular use, as do mouse scroll wheels, so I gather you're correct about cheap components.
Come to think of it, the scroll wheel on my Logitech G502 — three-way clickable, switchable between free-scrolling and traditional mode — would work well in sort of handheld hardware scrolling device, and an electromagnetic scroll wheel of the sort used on some newer Logitech mice would work even better, as it could be configured in a free-scrolling mode with variable friction.
Reminds me of when I jailbroke an old iPhone and the only thing I really actually used the jailbreak for was making a long press on the volume buttons a previous / next song button. I actually really miss it.
I've been thinking of removing the scroll wheel from my media PC's mouse to make doom scrolling harder. Love to see the innovation in going hard the other direction.
I know a few doom scrollers for whom this would be incredibly tempting. The video looked like it requires a lot of rotations per screen tick. Can that be adjusted?
Now I am wondering if you can connect a bluetooth mouse to a phone to achieve the same effect, albeit in a less convenient package.
People talking about old Blackberry and other phone/handhelds that had scroll wheels.... was reminded of the more recent Rabbit R1 device "analog scroll wheel"
Joke or not, this could be a pretty ergonomic way to read long form content. Currently I rebind my mouse side buttons to page up/down which serves much the same purpose, since scrolling endlessly on a mouse doesn't feel great for your hands.
I actually have a working prototype or two plus some cad for making a clicky scroll wheel using those chunky cnc Dials, is there a market for that? (The haptics of a cnc dial make it really nice for jumping around really long documents )
Edit: I’ve got usb c and usb a versions, I mean stuff like https://images.app.goo.gl/7t7SCs945yyxinsM8 when I say dial. Still messing around with what sorts of enclosure etc for the overall device
Honestly I've always wanted something like this for reading ebooks.
After many iterations (and neck injuries) I've found the best position for me is simply laying horizontally with a normal sleeping pillow. Then using a stand with an arm to hold the device at the perfect position/distance (I use progressive glasses).
Typically I only lift my arm to scroll to the next page. But sometimes I skim sections of technical books and keep my arm lifted to move quickly. Holding the arm up for 5-10 minutes becomes annoying.
For Kindle, there are wireless page-turner attachments. Supposedly you can use a Bluetooth dongle to connect to a standard Android remote clicker, after jailbreaking. Jailbreaking my Kindle was a very frustrating project, so I gave up on that in favor of using an android device, so I could read lying on my back as you described.
This is really neat, I wonder how hard it would be to retool for Android camera controls.
There's an accessory for the iPhone to get physical camera controls, but it's thicc
Every band of builders in a garage needs a variety of classes, but at least one Doomscroller. While everyone else's attention is down, in, focused, the Doomscroller looks outward.
They are the teams eyes and ears, continuously maintaining the indespensible information grounding signal. A streaming infinite scrolling HTML connection to the garage, from the real world.
You just need to first click on the scroller element and then you can start dragging it. And start by dragging up, not down. Otherwise the refresh might override the interaction
One of the best UIs I've ever used was on Sony phone with a scroller-button. Scroller was to choose the option and button underneath (you pushed the scroller) was to select. Very fast, easy to learn and usable.
I thought that when I started this thing. Turns out, every device implements slightly different flavors of USB-HID in their drivers. It's a complete shitshow under the hood. I'm trying to get iOS working, but it's so opaque compared to Android. I have achieved limited functionality with iOS, but it's not the buttery smooth action I can get on PC or Android.
(I'll copy and paste the text here, as I don't know how much you see of this text logged out)
> Why couldn’t I just emulate a standard mouse and scroll smoothly? Sounds easy. Unfortunately there is a holdover from two decades ago in the way mouse drivers are written into USB. Because mice used to use low resolution encoders, a single “detent” event would be about 22.5 degrees. Hard coded into the kernel level of Android and Windows is the instruction to interrupt this single detent as a 40 pixel scroll for generic devices. This is what results in the chunky style scrolling on a PC.
> Only recently have specialty devices like the Logitech mice used custom drivers to bypass this and offer high resolution single pixel scrolling instructions. Unfortunately these drivers were not rolled into the Android kernel, so even when I sniffed the BLE traffic with Wireshark and impersonated a Logitech device, I wouldn’t get that silky smooth scrolling on mobile. No go.
> The slightly hacky workaround was to go one level deeper than the standard Arduino libraries.
> A quick description of how USB devices work. HID stands for Human Interface Device and is a protocol implemented over USB protocol. HID devices do advertise their capabilities through the HID report descriptor, a fixed set of bytes describing exactly what HID reports may be sent between the device and the host and the meaning of each individual bit in those reports. For example, a HID Report Descriptor may specify that “in a report with ID 3 the bits from 8 to 15 is the delta x coordinate of a mouse”. The HID report itself then merely carries the actual data values without any extra meta information.
> My goal was to use a customized descriptor to send the byte package of a one finger touchpad with absolutely coordinate system and 1 button to the host. This way I could perform the digital emulation of a finger making contact with the screen, performing a Y axis movement while remaining in contact, and then lifting off the screen before reaching the top. This movement would have to be repeated hundreds of times seamlessly to provide the illusion of smooth scrolling.
> Additional complications arose from the fact that Bluetooth low energy has a minimum latency of 8milliseconds, with most hosts negotiating an even slower rate such as 20 milliseconds. Simply blasting commands at a few hundred hertz doesn’t work.
> The internet is filled with unanswered forum questions about how to do all of this. I think I’m probably the first one to achieve a working implementation of this particular smooth scrolling solution. This single problem occupied much time than the rest of the project combined. No doubt that Logitech or Apply could achieve a more elegant solution. My hope is that a big company takes interest in Doomscroller takes it off my hands.
(I'm not a SME, but I looked a bit into this while buying a bluetooth headphone)
Audio works with some bluetooth specific codecs like SBC, Qualcomm aptX (adaptive/HD), LDAC, ... or Opus and AAC
These codecs need to be supported by both sender and receiver.
And for example many bluetooth speakers only support SBC as they don't want to pay the fees for aptX and LDAC (which are both codecs that sound and work very well, LDAC even supports up to 96 kHz sample rates with 32 bit depth).
So I suppose (i don't know for sure) problems could be a) audio is more of a special case with all its codecs b) SBC is widespread, but does not sound good c) codec support on operating systems and bluetooth chips varies widely.
Honestly, I'm a bit tempted. I read quite a bit on my laptop while lying down and my arms are always in a bit of awkward position in order to scroll. I have been thinking of getting one of those presenter tools.
EE here - he technically has to comply with FCC Part B since he's selling in the US. That said, the hobbyist keyboard community has been pulling this for a while for small group orders without issues. Pre-certified modules are helpful, but stuff gets weird when it's on a board, so no guarantees. The fact that it's on a single layer board doesn't instill confidence since that typically means less than ideal return paths that can cause problems.
Are there any details available? Dimensions, charging, etc?
Actually, this can be used as a presentation clicker, right? There you go, business expense.