Automatic Mouse Clicking with a 555 Timer

For reasons that are mysteriously “too complex to go into,” hacker Matt Owen needed to register mouse clicks at a set interval for hours at a time. Obviously doing this manually was out of the question, so he instead turned to the venerable 555 timer chip, along with a relay, to add automatic clicking functionality to his mouse.

For the build, he used a ready-made kit with two potentiometers that control how long the relay stays on and the gap between relay pulses. This relay was then wired into a mouse’s left button to act as a trigger, and a button was added to switch this feature on and off.

To use, I press the red button, and the green LED lights to show the unit is active. Whilst it’s active, the relay triggers every minute and ‘clicks’ the left mouse button. The red LED flashes every time the trigger fires. To disable and use the mouse normally, I just press the red button again to switch the unit off. It works perfectly.

You can see it in action in the video below, along with the custom app he wrote for testing.