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Using an optical mouse for a trackball.
Bgnome:
obviously, if someone was going to go through the trouble of building his own trackball, he would have considered buying one at least to some degree.
personally, i would think that this ball, (acrylic juggling ball with sparkles), would work nicely and look pretty to boot when a LED shines through it:
macally has a similar optical PC trackball, so i know it works:
if you mount a ball above the optical sensor from an optical trackball, at least then you would get the correct axes. i noticed in another thread, someone actually looked up the IC datasheet for the chip in his mouse, so maybe that be something for you to do.
markb:
Yeah, I've given it a lot of thought about buying one but I live in the UK and they are not easy to come by without quite a lot of expense. Maybe If i don't get this little project working I will splash out.
I have had a bit more success though, I found a little program called 'reverse mouse' it was on a practical joke website and runs in the background to other applications. It inverts the mouse directions and is only 15kb in size so I am going to see if I get get it to change only one direction of the mouse instead of both.
I like the look of that juggling ball, I bet that would look cool back lit. I've just tried to spray paint the nylon hockey ball with flecked metallic paint, it was a no go as the mouse would not pick it up. Still I have a few more options before i try and change the innards of the mouse.