Looking for Help: Trackball has lost an axis!

[oldskoolcade]

I've noticed that this has started happening recently.  I've got an imperial trackball with one of Kelsey's fine trackball mouse hacks.  It's been working perfect since I got it but now I find that on a bunch of occasions, it's losing it's y-axis.  So to make sure that it's not the trackball optics, I've switched around the leads and I get motion on the x-axis when rolling it up/and down...So it leads me to believe that there's something wrong with the actual mousehack board.  But I've never had any problems with the board itself, and like I said, Kelsey does an amazing job with these things.   Is there something else that may be at work here (i.e. a windows USB conflict, or bug)?  Would the mouseboard become faulty over time, and only on one axis?

If any of y'all have some sort of idea, I'd love to hear about it!

Cheers!
Mike

[2600]

Well you've done some good debugging so far.  You proved the Trackball and it's optics work and are aligned.

It's possible the mouse is going bad, but unlikely.  I would think that the most likely problem is the connection of the leads to the mouse has become loose or disconnected.  Or the connector on the leads has become loose or disconnected.  Take a look in that direction and see if you see any bad solder joints, connections, or anything like that.  Post pictures if you are not familiar with that stuff.

[oldskoolcade]

thanks for the suggestions.  I removed the trackball from my cabinet along with all the pertinent cabling and plugged it into my main computer.  All seemed to work just fine and dandy.  I've now replugged the trackball et al  back into my cabinet pc, but haven't fastened it down.  I test ran a few games (notable World Class Bowling because that's the game it always seemed to go funky), and so far so good.  It's quite possible that there may be a wonky solder joint, but from what I can see, all looks good in that department.

I've put an e-mail into Kelsey to see if he had heard of a similar thing with other customers, but I know how busy he is these days so that's why I figured I'd come here for some help.   I'm thinking of crafting some sort of housing for the mousehack and cabling so that any future jostling will minimize the possiblity of damage.

I'll keep all posted, but again, if you have any other ideas, please lemme know!

Cheers!
Mike