problem with mouse hack for an arcade spinner

[TheShanMan]

I recently pulled my "prototype" homemade spinner which used a mechanical mouse hack and figured "why not see if I can hook my arcade spinner (I believe from a tempest machine) to that mouse?" And I have my centipede trackball so I figured I'd test both out and see if a mouse hack will cut it. The spinner and trackball have the optical boards, so I figured I'd try just wiring that up to the mouse according to instructions that are easy to find on the subject.

Well, the trackball seems to work great, and the spinner mostly works, but if I spin it fast, sometimes the mouse moves just like you'd expect, and sometimes it moves REALLY slowly, until the spinner comes to a stop. And if I move the spinner very slowly, sometimes it moves slowly in the OPPOSITE direction as it should (I think it only happens when it should be going to the right).

Any ideas why this might be occurring? My mouse is a serial mouse, and the chip on it is putting out 4 volts rather than 5. Could that be the issue? The serial cable wires include +9v and -9v. I wonder if it might be worth running it with +9 just to see if that helps (I wouldn't care if I blew something on the mouse in the process - as long as I don't blow the optical circuit on the spinner!).

Also, I saw one guide to doing the mouse hack that said NOT to remove the mouse's optical components (while others say to do so). I didn't remove them. Again, the trackball seems to work fine, but I wonder if the faster motion of the spinner could somehow be an issue with those unused optical components on the mouse. Or maybe a combination of the lower voltage and the presence of the mouse's optical components.

I was originally planning to buy a mini-pac anyway, so I'm not terribly concerned about making this work, but at the same time if the optical inputs are taken care of by the mouse hack, then it gives me a little more flexibility in which keyboard encoder I go with to replace my nearly 10 year old keyboard hack.

Any thoughts would be appreciated.

[ark_ader]

I made my spinners via mouse hacks, and the only two problems were the ones you have reported.

The spinner would "go out of alignment" and the cursor would move in jumps.  The other was the duration of the spin.

I used a hard drive motor for the basis of my mouse hack, and the issues were the optics on the mouse board were not registering the spindles on the shaft of the spinner through the sensors.  I tried printing out several notched dials but there were not registering properly.  In the end I trashed the mouse board and bought another that worked perfectly, so its better to see if the encoder is at fault.

The other issue about duration of the spin related to weight.  If the spinner had more weight at the bottom of the shaft - the spinner would travel more.  If your spinner is an arcade pull, maybe some WD40 is needed?


This is the same attempt but better documented.  I would scrap the whole thing and get a Opti-Pac, unless your budget is tight.
http://www.doughansen.net/arcade/spinner.htm

[TheShanMan]

My budget is kinda tight (I have a lot I want to buy, and must get "buy in" from the wife!), so I was hoping that I could use this rather than getting a mini-pac, thus giving me more options for the keyboard encoder (I'd rather have a mouse hack than a keyboard hack - I can't wait to scrap my kb hack!).

I don't think we had the same issues. I'm using the spinner's optics and the disk with the little holes in it. The only part of the mouse I'm using is the electronics part. The spinner itself is a tempest spinner, not a homemade style spinner, so I don't think there are any issues with weight or anything. It just doesn't seem to always read the motion properly. That's where I'm thinking the low voltage (4v vs. 5v) might come into play, and/or the fact that I left the mouse's optical components in the circuit (so the mouse sees 2 optical components wired in parallel per axis basically).

Unless someone recognizes the symptoms I described before and has some relevant advice, I'm planning to first remove the mouse's optical components and see if that makes it better. If not, then  I will probably try going with the 9v supply to see if the low voltage is the problem. And if all else fails, I will definitely toss it in the garbage and get a mini-pac or opti-pac.

Incidentally, I've been trying out the trackball on games like marble madness and kick and have noticed no problems whatsoever, but it could be that there are issues that are not very noticeable since trackballs tend to spin slower than a spinner does.

[EwJ]

Is the spinners encoder wheel warped at all, are the optics gummed up with dust?
Have you tried adjusting the sensitivity in mame for the spinner games?
If you havn't, check those first.  Then desolder the mouse optics, if that
doesn't help, try another mouse? (old mice are a dime a dozen)

[Lilwolf]

btw, this is the standard overspin problem. 

Whats happening that your spinning faster then the polling rate.   Basically you are moving so fast, that it now seems like your actually at the same spot as last poll, or even a bit backwards.  (think looking at a helicopter blades on a movie)

There are programs that you can find to increase this in windows.   I haven't tried any recently to see if they work in XP or help this problem.   If you PM me, I think I have a copy of one of them at home, I could send you if you cant find it.

You can also chang the encode wheel.  I think making the pins smaller and more of them, but that seems like it would hurt it... I don't know how to fix it, but I'm pretty sure you can.... Others will need to help.

You can also get a professional optic encoder from the IPac and KeyWiz brands.  Both will solve this for you.

Good luck

[TheShanMan]

Yeah, that's kind of what I suspected. I may try proceeding with my plan just because there is no harm in it and I have time on my hands right now, but it sounds like an encoder is the way to go and they're cheap anyway, so that's fine.

Thanks for the input, guys!

[u_rebelscum]

... My mouse is a serial mouse...

Serial mice have lower poll rates than ps/2 and usb.  Due to this, they are more susceptible to the aforementioned backspin issue.  (Also, they're usually older with older tech, which also might add to the "too slow".)

If you want to keep it cheap, see if you can find a ps/2 or usb ball mouse laying around to hack.

[TheShanMan]

Thanks. That doesn't surprise me a bit, and that's undoubtedly the reason it puts out 4v rather than 5, so that's another knock against it.

I tried it with a new usb one, but I couldn't get it to work so I think it was incompatible for some reason (it's a generic dell mouse - who makes it I have no idea).

The GGG encoder is amazingly cheap ($15 I think) so it just doesn't make sense to go buy another mouse, hope it's compatible, and waste time trying to get it hooked up when for so cheap I can get a tried and true setup.

I appreciate all the input guys!