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New Trackball Design for easier installation
Marsupial:
My hope would be to find a suitable mouse that's small enough to fit without having to rebuild a mouse system for the trackball. I've seen tiny travel optical mice that could perhaps do something great in such setup (to try)
I soldered surface mount on custom made pcbs before, but before that I had to actually engineer the device... Making a whole mouse from ground up seems like a lot of work for something that may be fixed by mounting existing pcbs inside the shell.
Stefan's genius work here is the shell.
nitrogen_widget:
--- Quote from: Vigo on February 13, 2020, 06:27:43 pm ---This looks like the American equivalent for the google challenged:
https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B002B3YCQM
https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B008968NGU
--- End quote ---
I'd be printing the shell out of ABS for pennies.
$20 is too much.
What you need to do is find what optical module those mice use.
what LED emitter and what CMOS sensor then just look up example.
10-1 they are using the generic circuit diagram for the optical module.
they just use SMD components because they can.
we should probably start with the chip's from mice that work and don't work since i'm just guessing as i've not done anything in 20 yrs with LED emitters and receivers and even then it was just an experiment in class to transmit mono audio in dark room 5 ft in my electronics lab.
Xerobull:
This is fantastic. Any updates, Stefan?
I would
1. Patent
2. Engage China for manufacturing
3. Kickstarter it
markymark72:
No activity on here for a long time and nothing on youtube either which is a real shame.
Quick question, does Stefans original design use plain ball bearings or the ball transfer bearings that were posted by another? I can tell in the youtube video as its so small and fast.
Cheers
PL1:
--- Quote from: markymark72 on November 20, 2022, 02:53:22 am ---No activity on here for a long time
--- End quote ---
Ropi Jo started looking into doing something like this last month.
http://forum.arcadecontrols.com/index.php/topic,167034.msg1760284.html#msg1760284
The thing that stopped me from going further several years ago is the Y-axis inversion issue.
- When you flip a mouse on it's back with the "tail" toward you and mount a ball over it, the X-axis works right but the Y-axis is reversed.
- If you're only using the trackball in MAME, it's easy to reverse the Y-axis in the game settings.
- If you want the trackball to work normally in Windows, you need to mod the PCB or encoder. :banghead:
--- Quote from: markymark72 on November 20, 2022, 02:53:22 am ---does Stefans original design use plain ball bearings or the ball transfer bearings that were posted by another?
--- End quote ---
The transfer bearings that I mentioned earlier are too large for a 2.25" trackball, but might work with a 3" or larger.
Stefan used small bearings like these.
There's more info and some 3d-printable testbed files that use these small bearings in Ropi Jo's thread.
http://forum.arcadecontrols.com/index.php/topic,167034.msg1760347.html#msg1760347
Scott