Wiggle me this

One of the more quirky vendors in the Mac world that I keep track of is WiebeTech. Based out of Wichita, they got their start making unique FireWire (IEEE 1394) devices and have wandered in interesting ways ever since. Their latest product has engendered feedback leading to this quote on the page for the Mouse Jiggler:

Thanks for the interesting emails - no, this was not an April Fools joke.

Our cases are in and they're beginning to ship. They look great, and the feedback so far has been fantastic.

So what does this 'Jiggler' do? Apparently, you attach it to a USB connection and it periodically moves the mouse. That's it. Goofy and brilliant in the same beat. Here's the description from the promotional email they sent:

Need to download a big file, run an install, or perform a back-up without wondering if your computer will fall asleep and interrupt it? Want to stop worrying about having to type your password into your computer every time you walk away from your desk for a few minutes? Whatever your reason may be for not wanting a computer to go idle, WiebeTech has the answer.

A lot of people are going to think this is the most idiotic thing they've ever heard of, but some are going to want it. WiebeTech seems to have built it for the forensics investigators they've always catered to, but it may serve a purpose for lots of mainstream customers, especially laptop owners. Security won't be something users are thinking about.

I'm constantly fiddling with the Energy Saver settings on my laptop. I might start a long lived process in a screen session or I'm doing something like video transcoding. I don't want the system going to sleep until the process finishes. It's not a problem with my desktop since it never goes to sleep without me putting it there and has a pretty long delay to the screen saver.

While I haven't bothered to really look into it, creating a small application to handle generating spurious 'user events' should be possible. However, lacking the equivalent of a safe Monkey Lives or in the case of the forensics community where changing the system by adding a new application is frowned upon, a cheap USB device is marketable. I'm not ready to buy one at $30, but many will. Enough to support itself? Probably.

Twenty years ago, a standard approach would have used an easily licensed USB transceiver and minimal ASIC glue to generate mouse movement events. This type of approach has obviously become a lot easier and cheaper over the years. Today I'd guess that this kind of part costs less then $10 to fabricate (even in relatively small quantities). It's got to be even cheaper for a company with a lot of USB experience. Two versions (slow and fast) might drive that cost up a bit, but apparently not enough that they decided to create a driver (or so it appears).

Have we arrived at a point in time where even small applications by small vendors can economically transition to custom hardware? Not quite I think, but we're getting ever closer.