The vrSensors project provides access to real-time position of optical mouse, connected via USB. The only dependency is the pyusb library, which works via libusb http://www.libusb.org.

If you're on WINDOWS, follow the instructions here http://www.libusb.org/wiki/libusb-win32

To check the installation, make sure that

• libusb0.sys is in windows\system32\drivers
• libusb0.dll is in windows\system32
• libusb0.dll is in windows\syswow64 (if 64bit)

If a mouse is automatically recognized as a HID device, one should follow steps described in Device Driver Installation. After that the mouse should become a libusb-win32 type device and no longer impact the movement of the screen pointer.

If you're on LINUX, check this out http://www.libusb.org/wiki/libusb-1.0

there should be also a package for Debian systems:

sudo apt-get install libusb-1.0-0-dev

Make sure (!!) to run demo / tests / modules with sudo, as activating the communication with a device on Linux requires detaching it from the kernel, which requires administrative priviledges.