Strange occurrence with a mouse hack!

[Popcorrin]

I recently hooked up a happs trackball with a microsoft intellimouse mouse hack.  I couldn't get it to work.  I messed around with it for about an hour and it suddenly started working.  I wasn't sure why so I opened up my control panel and noticed that the ground wire from the trackball optic boards had come loose.  I hooked it back up and the trackball quit working.  I disconnected it and the trackball started working again.

I'm not sure why it works this way.  Maybe someone on this board has a better understanding of it and can shed some light on why this is.

[stevejt]

Are you sure you have all the connections right?  ground is testing as negative, and h x/y and v x/y are all testing as positive?  the emitters and detectors are just infrared LED's.  If you have one of them wired wrong on the mouse hack, that might be causing your problem.  If you don't have a multimeter to test the voltage, you might be able to test voltage that low with another (visible light) LED if youk know the polarity for the leads.


Steve