how bout making your OWN TRACKBALL

[brained]

Has someone tried to make their own trackball. I know you can buy them, but has anyone tried making their own. I'm going to try to make one.  

i've got a couple of mice roling round my house, i'll try to break a couple of them messing up with this.

[SirPoonga]

My friend is going to make a hyperbowling tball.  He has access to free blank bowling balls.  He is going to mount a comptuer tball optic near the bowling ball.  The bowling ball will be on ball bearings.

[brained]

HUGE BOWLING BALL!!  

My idea came because i've got an old Compaq Presario 486 notebook trackball, and I've said hey that would be cool. So i'm gonna be wrecking that thing up and see what happens.  

[spystyle]

Has someone tried to make their own trackball. I know you can buy them, but has anyone tried making their own. I'm going to try to make one.  

i've got a couple of mice roling round my house, i'll try to break a couple of them messing up with this.

Cheep makes his own spinners and trackballs :

http://www.cheeptech.com/

This guy is a genious

[Stingray]

I would love to see pictures of this bowling ball trackball once finished. Sounds completely mad!

-S

[spystyle]

Hey!

Has anyone made their own trackball yet?

As for the bowling ball idea - why not a candlepin bowling ball? IIR those have no holes.

How could we build that?

Cheers,
Craig

[Crowquill]

My friend is going to make a hyperbowling tball.  He has access to free blank bowling balls.  He is going to mount a comptuer tball optic near the bowling ball.  The bowling ball will be on ball bearings.

That's not a bad idea. The trickiest part of dealing with optical mice for something like this is that it has to be almost touching for most optical sensors. Designing and building something like that with that kind of tolerance can be difficult.

It might be easier than trying to interface it to the Presario trackball. If you go with a traditional roller setup, you can always order the optic boards from fixumdude.

[ChadTower]

That could be easily dealt with just by adding some sort of wrapping around the bearing... a little saran wrap around the bearings would give an excellent way to play with that distance down to a fraction of a millimeter.  Friction wearing down the paper would be a concern but we could find a stronger material with the same ability.