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.
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!
Are you the author?
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.
Anyway, excellent work!
Good to know, I'm new here!
You're very welcome!
user: enderfusion > created: July 21, 2015 > karma: 419
Interesting - and WELCOME!
I looked at my site analytics …
Is that not a way of saying “author here, …”?
International turned on
>> I'm glad you don't ship outside of the US 'cause I would be insanely tempted to buy this completely superfluous gadget.
> International turned on
Best HN troll ever :-)
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."
If that concept amuses you, you should check out this book: https://www.amazon.com/Motel-Mysteries-David-Macaulay/dp/039...
This is a really good book, thank you.
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.
It does ship internationally now.
I love it. I think it would be even funnier if you made it only scroll in one direction (downwards) to remove any possible semblance of being useful.
Tempting. never_look_back.bin firmware?
A hardware limit would be more funny even
A loud audible ratchet mechanism. Just to add to the annoyance.
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.
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.
This is the opposite of that.
I love that entirely.
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!
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
What if both directions go downwards? That’s even more surprising to the first time user. That moment of confusion.
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.
Surely scrolling back is in the pro subscription plan?
have you raised any capital for this project? i think a lot of incubators could be interested in helping you enshittify this idea.
The whole thing cost me a few hundred bucks to put together.
Is it legal to sell a device with radio in the US without FCC certification?
In the EU it's illegal to sell without external certification if the product is a medical device, is made for children or contains a radio.
Certification will typically cost you $5,000-$15,000 depending on which lab you use.
How does that works if you're just reusing off the shelf bluetooth component? (that's likely already certified)
Off the shelf radio module, ain't nobody got time for certs.
Modules like ESP32-WROOM, Seeed XIAO ESP32C3, and ES2810AA2 comes certified, re-certifications should not be needed(IANAL).
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.
And end up like Humane? No thanks! It's at optimal shittiness levels currently.
Product needs the ability to brick itself if a subscription to the scrolling service expires
Only works with Android/PC. Sorry iOS
If this was implemented as a Bluetooth mouse with just a scroll wheel, wouldn’t you get support on all recent operating systems for free?
From his twitter:
(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.
Jump from completely out of context here... Wait, bluetooth devices are USB ones tunneled over bluetooth?
If that's the case, why does audio work so badly? (I'm guessing there's a list of exceptions that BT supports natively, none of which work.)
Yeah, surprised me too. There are different categories inside of Bluetooth, classic and low energy. LE has a low rate, no more than 100hz.
(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.
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.
Just clone the scroll messaging from any old generic that works already. MiM for the easy win.
A lot of generics (and name brands!) really don’t work right though. Scroll wheel is a mess in macOS.
Logi ergo scroll wheel doesn’t work. ProtoArc M01 works for a bit then stops working after a few minutes. Logi M575 works flawlessly.
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.
Just use a BT mouse.
Edit: or BT ... scroll: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40099700
Thanks. Great tip for iPads but probably doesn't work with Kindle devices.
Bought for partner and their Kindle. Recommend. https://www.amazon.com/dp/B08T8CZYF3
(no affiliation)
Fascinating! Any idea how do these work?
Simulates capacitive touch.
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.
I don't get it. What's it do?
On the website there is a demo, when you spin the wheel, it scrolls a screen on the right. The demo may be blocked by an adblocker.
Ah, yes the demo is blocked by uOrigin
Oh, the demo doesn't load with uBlock Origin.
it just constantly scrolls down on your screen, its a gag product
It did load for me, but didn't scroll. So, my reaction was "What do I need a giant spinning knob for? It could be a fan at least"
There's plenty of wireless standalone scroll knobs out there if this sounds like your cup of tea https://www.amazon.com/Razer-Wireless-Control-Pod-Customizat...
That looks way better for PC, didn't know that existed.
Yeah, there are some neat PC input devices outside of keyboard and mouse. Since I do a lot of 3D work I use a 6 axis knob in my left hand while I drag my mouse with my right https://www.amazon.com/3Dconnexion-3DX-700059-Spacemouse-Com...
Got myself USB pedals on Amazon specifically for Ctrl-C, Ctrl-V and quickly got addicted.
Which pedals did you get?
Another was discontinued in 2018: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Griffin_PowerMate
Surface Dial's mutant cousin.
I'm using Dial's PC drivers :)
I love my dial, how about a gear stick style one where you can push forward and back for your next project :)
But does it actually run Doom?
Since it looks to be built on the ESP32 platform, the answer is likely yes (but you'd need a display...) https://github.com/espressif/esp32-doom
I think actually there are a couple of DOOM ports for the platform.
You could pan through an epic Doom game video capture? If you like deterministic games.
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 agree, I still miss it 20 years later.
Same story with original ipod. Hugely underrated interface.
Add a number lcd displaying how many miles you have scrolled so far
Read my mind.
That would be an awesome idea, as well as calories/kilojoules burnt and/or brain cells destroyed.
the site just needs some subdomains, like https://ai.doomscroller.xyz for an extra bit of charm
abc.doomscroller.xyz
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.
Tempting. But the addition of an upper/downer mash-safe minimal-profile/motion post-to-post navigating trigger pair would be a deal maker.
Site doesn't even work on Android.
It's not responsive, but it does work.
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
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.
The only downsides are price & lack of click.
Why the hell do you need a click while lying down and reading? If you needs a device which scrolls and clicks you already have a mouse.
Think about those who reads in transport, if you will take a BT mouse that there are high chances that some unwanted clicks will happen all the time.
I hate it. I love 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.
You're meant to hate it. It's dumb. I'm actively making the world a worse place by the invention of it.
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.
,” said Load Letter, finally looking up from their plughack console.
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.
Currently I rebind my mouse side buttons to page up/down
Amazing idea
If somebody could invent something like this to turn my kindle pages
This was brilliant, I played with it longer than I really should have
Should be paired with the OG Doomscroller: https://endlessdoomscroller.com
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
brings back memories of my ipod which i never had.
Needs knurling.
I would like to buy a device but seems like Stripe does not send it to Ukraine.
Fairly sure the battery won't explode
Love that one!
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
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"
you're welcome: https://www.gsmarena.com/flashback_sony_ericsson_p910-news-5...
lateral scroll wheel. awesome phone:
https://fdn.gsmarena.com/imgroot/news/21/08/sony-ericsson-p9...
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.
Jog Dial
Had a Palm III then a Clié back then. The Jog Dial was absolutely awesome.
Then got a LifeDrive, missed every bit of the Jog Dial. Probably the most iPhone-esque thing before the iPhone was a thing though.
sorry nerd, no t9 = no buy, how am I supposed to text under the desk at school without t9???
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.
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.
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.
0: https://m.gsmarena.com/marshalls_new_smartphone_is_every_aud...
Hm, I remember portable MP3 players with those. The wheel broke fairly easily. Maybe they used cheap wheels in those, and there are higher end wheels.
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.
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.
I always wondered if one could repurpose side-mounted fingerprint sensors (ex. Samsung Galaxy Fold) as a swipe-to-scroll mechanism.
There also used to be some lovely touchpad tech called "chiral scroll", which allowed for iPod-like scrolling. No idea where that went, patent hell?
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.
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.
An old phone if mine (not sure, but I think from OnePlus) supported gestures in the fingerprint sensor (back mounted in this case)
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).
Another cool example is Nexus One's trackball. It had advantage of being able to scroll in any direction.
You could make a device like the doom scroller that would look like a roll on deodorant stick.
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.
Afaik TikTok and the Kindle app both respondto media back/next keys, which is how the TikTok Bluetooth remotes work.
A touch sensitive side would be great for thumb scrolling.
With software detection of coherent scroll sliding, filtering out grip holds, bumps, and other irrelevant activity.
But noooo! Apple stuck a touch sensitive screen on a keyboard! No justice.
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.
I love the dial on apple watches for this reason.
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.
All the OG blackberries had this, are they that long ago that their forgotten? It was how you played brick breaker.
You are not the only one!
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.