Bringing Intelligence to the automated “Mouse Shaker”
What does it do?
ShakerBot is capable of acting just like a real mouse and keyboard, so it can simulate mouse movements and inject keyboard keystrokes as needed to keep your Laptop, Phone, Chromebook, tablet awake. It can inject mouse movements and/or keystrokes as needed to potentially logout, login, or keep a game or application awake. This can keep your company’s oversight software thinking you are online, or keeping a game or application seeing your interaction and believe your still active.
Key ShakerBot Features:
- Intelligently move your mouse
- Inject keystrokes to your device
- Supports Windows, Linux, Chromebooks, Android devices, Apple devices
- Gets time, date and day of the week over the internet so you are always working in current time.
- Supports getting “over-the-air” (OTA) updates.
- Has built-in Webserver for configuration, can be accessed constantly while ShakerBot is running
- Can connect to your device via USB port or as a Bluetooth device
- Can control, or keep alive applications or games on your device
- Circuitry added to allow data signals of USB connector to be disabled so device is only drawing power from the USB connector
- Randomization capabilities built in so that ShakerBot mouse movement and frequency are random.
Where did ShakerBot come from?
So ShakerBot came from what to us was an everyday irritation, an itch that needed scratching.
Some of us are in a work environment that has a policy to time out and log off our computers for no activity very quickly (like a few minutes quickly). When that does happen the login process to get back up and working requires dual factor authentication so it’s not the quickest. If you scramble, you might be able to make a trip to the restroom, the coffee bar or the vending machines without being logged off but you better not putter around getting back to your computer.
You may be fortunate enough to be working in an environment that is more forgiving but you get the general idea.
We have also seen examples of problems of the screen going blank if you are doing a presentation but not using “Presentation Mode” or are on a zoom or teams call and a lack of activity on your system could log you out, again similar problem if you have to go back through the login process again (so much for grabbing a cup of coffee while someone is rambling on about something that is only important to them)
So, a couple of us started talking about what we could do to keep our laptops up and on line even if we stepped away for a few minutes. We started by looking at other products that are on the market and honestly, they really weren’t very attractive.
We found that you could get either a device that “jiggled” your mouse around if you set it on top of an optical turntable. While some of those are programmable, they assume that you are using a mouse and not a touch pad and they are pretty chunky.
An alternative to that is a USB device that plugs into your computer but those aren’t programmable and kept jiggling as long as your computer was left on so that didn’t work for us either (plus, if you are in an environment that doesn’t permit additional devices plugged into your computer’s USB port, it automatically rules these types of devices out)
Being a bunch of engineers, we were unimpressed and decided that we could do better. So, to “scratch the itch” we came up with what we’re calling the ShakerBot.
We started by putting together a wish list of things that we would want in the “perfect” mouse jiggler.
We wanted the flexibility to plug in as a standard USB device and have it function normally as a secondary mouse or pointing device or use the USB port or an external Wall Wart for power only and connect to the computer as a Bluetooth mouse.
It needs to have an easy way to set which days of the week it needs it needs to operate and what starting and quitting times for each day
We wanted to be able to have it “wake up” the computer so that it was ready to be logged into first thing in the morning when we sat down in front of the keyboard and have it stay on throughout the work day.
To make sure it didn’t look like we were running off of a fixed timer, we added a randomization feature so that it turned on a few minutes early and turned off a few minutes later than the normal working day but never at exactly the same time. Plus, we wanted the randomization to only work to add a few more minutes to the work day and never take any away (it will never show up late or leave early).
We thought it would be ideal if we had a way to make sure that the correct date and time were always right so we added the ability to connect to the internet and periodically sync up by pulling down the current date and time for your time zone.
As an added feature, we wanted the ability to update the device “over the air” (OTA) so that it could take advantage of any improvements that come along in the future.
Finally, we wanted to be able to completely isolate the USB signaling lines so you could plug it into your computer and only use it for power and not have it appear as a USB device
So a pretty ambitious wish list for a mouse jiggler but we figured it out, we figured all of it out.
