[Ido Gendel] was thinking about new and interesting ways to send data between devices, when he realized that the answer was right in his hand. Literally: he decided to try sending data using the mouse pointer. What he came up with was an interesting hack that uses small movements of the mouse pointer to send data at up to 1200bps, or about 150 bytes per second.

The way he did this was very, very clever. He used an Arduino Leonardo that is set to emulate a mouse, working alongside his existing mouse. This setup means that he can use his existing mouse: the system just sees the Arduino as a second mouse, and the pointer just looks a little jerky when you zoom in. That is because the Arduino is just sending tiny movements, each of which is a code that represents a nybble (4 binary bits) of data.

Manually typing your login password every time you need to login on your computer can get annoying, especially if it is long and complex. To tackle this problem [Lewis] assembled an NFC computer unlocker by using an Arduino Leonardo together with an NFC shield.

The world probably has enough ATMega32u4 (Arduino Leonardo) development boards. Some of them even put all the pins on a .100″ grid (unlike the original Arduino outline). But we feel that none of them is as easy to use on a breadboard as the BBLeo, which stands for breadboard Leonardo. The BBLeo is engineered to get you going quickly on a breadboard.

Just as in the Arduino Leonardo, the BBLeo has USB built in so you can just “plug and play”. Hint – all this great functionality that board developers like to brag about is usually built into the chips.