Motorized aim assist system uses a moving mousepad for laser-accurate headshots — a cannibalized GRBL drawing system and computer vision software deliver perfect shots

What do you do if you are so good at video games that playing against family and friends becomes drained of all its entertainment value? If you are Nick, at the Basically Homeless YouTube channel, you combine woodworking, hardware hacking, and software shenanigans to enhance your friendly foes with a slick, mechanized, mousepad-driven aim-assist system that imparts expert-level headshot skills. The system uses a computer vision model to monitor the screen and identify targets, and then moves the mousepad underneath the mouse to zero in on the perfect shot. In practice, this worked so well and so transparently that some of Nick’s opponents began to think they had elite-level aiming skills.

The finished moving mousepad aim assist system works great, but how was it actually created? Nick is the kind of person who thinks on his feet, so even before finalizing the design, he got busy routing a big hole in his bamboo-topped table, a few inches smaller than the sizable opaque white glass mousepad that had already been chosen.

He would pick a few different transport solutions before settling on using the gantry and controller board from an Xdraw A4 drawing board to move the mousepad physically. Thankfully, that choice still fits with his earlier decisions regarding the table routing and the mousepad.

Hacking to gain control of the drawing board revealed that it had a commonplace GRBL controller, so it wasn’t too complicated to command and control this stripped-down device. With this determined, Nick could get on with fitting the mousepad movement mechanism, stripped from the drawing board, under the table, and attaching the mousepad on top. A little bit of 3D printing was required to make the perfect inserts/spacers for the mousepad fitting and sliding mechanism.

The next step would have been mightily complicated had it not been for the availability of the YOLO-based computer vision model. Nick’s software implementation used this model to monitor the screen. Based on what was happening on the screen, the computer vision system would calculate the required motion and send serial commands to the mousepad’s GRBL-driven motion rig. This way, when a target was detected within a generous radius of the crosshair, the mechanized gantry swiftly adjusted the aim to become a laser-accurate headshot.

One of the best illustrations of how slickly the mechanical mousepad's aim assist worked was provided by Olivia, towards the end of the video. To start, she believed she was naturally good at eSports gaming. However, Nick quietly disabled the aim assist “for science,” and his opponent’s mood turned a little sour, accusing him of cheating… So, he turned it back on in the spirit of good sportsmanship.

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