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DIY Trackball

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ids:
Build your own arcade trackball: 3" Trackball
(ran out of orange filament, so finished it in white, hence the two-tone look)





And/or just encoder wheels:  Encoder Wheels
Tweakable for performance.

NoMoUserNames:
Cool idea. Did you have any specific reason for building your own, or is it a "I just want to see if I can do it" kind of thing?

ids:
Not much reason.  Was hoping to save ppl some coin, but not sure how much is actually saved this way.  Think it's about $3 in plastic to print.  Could easily be adapted to various ball sizes (haven't tried, but script is quite flexible).  Can also tweak the height to play with how much ball is exposed above your panel.  Easy to connect this to USB via a simple micro-controller or any arcade trackball to usb encoder.  Could use a cheap raspberry pi pico or arduino or whatever and find relevant code online to do this.  I have a pico doing this and keyboard combined, nkro, and very inexpensive.

The encoder wheels, however, let you tune the performance, getting a finer grained input from the device with more spokes, and vice-versa.  Should work with any trackball of this type (happ, betson, ggg, ultimarc, etc)

Did some atari volcano buttons a while back, so I guess this is just the next installment in arcade parts.

NoMoUserNames:
I love the idea. It always feels cooler to me to build something yourself. This is just one more sign that I really need to just buy a 3d printer. Might be a good time to start dropping hints to my wife about a potential Christmas gift...

I know I've seen the rollers/bearings sold in a few shops, but where did you get the encoder wheels?

ids:
The non-printed parts in that photo came from a real arcade trackball - except the pcb's, which I created.
If you click my first link, you'll find further links to various bits you can purchase, including encoder wheels.
However, the second link above is to a model to 3D print customizable encoder wheels.  Actually the trackball model has an option to only model the encoder wheel as well.  I've been experimenting with various options on these.

Where I live, local libraries will 3D print things for free, but don't tell your wife that till after Christmas  ;)

Since this is "Build Your Own Arcade Controls", I thought these would be applicable here  :)

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