Low budget DIY USB spinner

[Swainy]

Thought that someone would find this useful.

https://github.com/dekkit/Strap-On-Mouse-Spinner

A little video demonstrating it.

[danny_galaga]

Love it!

[Zebidee]

I love it too, the simplicity is sublime 

+1 for Aussie ingenuity! The dude in the video is obviously British, but dekkit, the clever bloke who posted the idea on FB originally, is Australian.

[oatcakeandy]

doh, now why didnt i think of that for my outrun mini build. maybe for pole position tho.

[pbj]

Yeah, okay, that's hilarious.  Did a quick test and it works... okay. 

[Nephasth]

I don't see the need for another mouse hack thread, so I thought I'd put this in with this one. Not trying to thread jack, and staying somewhat on topic. Louis, if you want me to remove this I have no problem doing so.

Built a "prototype" for the optical mouse spinner. Pretty straight forward. Some small planks of wood, genuine arcade cabinet brackets, a long bolt, nuts, washers, small plastic cup, and an optical mouse with the top cover removed.



Here you can see the clearance between the plastic cup and the mouse.


A quick video of the optical mouse spinner in use.

 

[BadMouth]

I'm currently working on a scratch built trackball setup to fit my narrow and shallow CP.  Been wondering if I'm wasting my time with encoders vs just using an optical mouse.  This makes me question even more.
The trackball could be resting on 3 bearings with an optical mouse underneath instead of fiddling with rollers and PITA to mount industrial encoders from the parts bin.



Here's my mouse hack spinner from way back.
The knob is a caster wheel with a cabinet door pull pushed into the center.
It had a really good feel.  The wheel had some weight to it.

[Thenasty]

what a Flashback (Great Hacking days)

[PL1]

I'm currently working on a scratch built trackball setup to fit my narrow and shallow CP.  Been wondering if I'm wasting my time with encoders vs just using an optical mouse.  This makes me question even more.
The trackball could be resting on 3 bearings with an optical mouse underneath instead of fiddling with rollers and PITA to mount industrial encoders from the parts bin.

You may have to deal with the Windows Y-axis inversion issue to use an off-the-shelf optical mouse for a trackball.
- Maybe you can mod an optical mouse PCB or use an optical trackball PCB since optical mice and optical trackballs use the same types of sensors.

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.   

There are links to hardware and OpenSCAD/3d-print files in those two threads if you want a good foundation to start from.


Scott