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O how I mourn thee, sweet trackball (with pics!)
pragma:
Great info and advice, Beley! Thanks!
I want to correct a possible misunderstanding. I didn't just bend the pins upward. I rotated the LED 180 degrees. That means, at least in my mental model I'm referring to right now (the actual part is at home!), that for each two-pin LED, what used to be the left pin is now the right pin and vice-versa.
I will double and triple check this tonight, and get back to you. If there are more pics you would want to see to help out, just ask.
Thanks again
Paul
pragma:
Another thought - if it is the LED, I should be able to confirm by seeing if I can get the mouse pointer to "wiggle" at all by letting natural light in and kind of jiggling the ball over the optical receiver. If I can confirm it's an LED problem, I'm part-way to the solution.
Paul
Chris:
Am I missing something? Shouldn't it be easy to see if the LED is lighting up or not?
Beley:
--- Quote from: pragma on March 18, 2003, 03:46:58 pm ---.....I rotated the LED 180 degrees. That means, at least in my mental model I'm referring to right now (the actual part is at home!), that for each two-pin LED, what used to be the left pin is now the right pin and vice-versa....
--- End quote ---
ah, ok if you rotated the led then mabey you did wire it right, in that case it might be a bad solder connection
--- Quote from: pragma on March 18, 2003, 03:46:58 pm ---...if it is the LED, I should be able to confirm by seeing if I can get the mouse pointer to "wiggle" at all by letting natural light in and kind of jiggling the ball over the optical receiver...
--- End quote ---
That might work, also what might work is to pull one of the leds out and fire a remote control through the hole and try to make it wiggle, as a remote control uses IR ligh also
--- Quote ---Am I missing something? Shouldn't it be easy to see if the LED is lighting up or not?
--- End quote ---
The leds are IR (InfraRed) leds, you can tell because they often have that blue tint in the lens. However depeding on the led and how good your eyes are you can sometimes see a dim red glow when a IR led is turned on in a dark room
I should also mention that the ways of telling the positive and negative leads on a led that i described in my last post(ie flat side, big/small metal bits) are not allways correct, i have run across a few led that dont follow these rules but they rare , i would guess only about 1-5% of leds
pragma:
Yes, I should think so, but it's inserted pretty deep into a well and I never could (even before dismantling it) see any light from the darkened "window" where the optical pickup lies. For all I know, these LEDS could be emitting in a non-visible spectrum also.
Paul