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Looking for Penny & Giles / Traxsys trackball help please

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hsr:
Hoping someone has now or had used a trackball like the one I have and can offer up some wiring help to get it interfaced and could be so kind as to help me sort through a problem I’m experiencing. 

While gathering parts for a new small cabinet project, I acquired a Penny & Giles trackball.  My plan was to interface this ball to the PC through an Opti-wiz.

Tracing the leads gets lost with all the other resistors and the IC on the board.

My apologies in advance if the terminology below is wrong.  The trackball has a RJ45 connector, so I had assumed that by taking an Ethernet cable, cutting and stripping it back, I’d have the wires to interface with.  However, what I am finding is not what I had hoped for.  Of the eight wires, only three (total) show any continuity when checked with a VOHM to the X and Y LEDs and the X and Y optic sensors.

Here is a photo of the very same trackball where you can see the LED X, QX, LED Y and QY solder points:



This photo shows the Cat5 connector:


I am only seeing continuity in the following:
LED X – white/green
X left – white/green
X center – black
X right (where it’s marked QX) – white/black

LED Y – black
Y left – white/green
Y center – black
Y right (again where it’s marked QY) – white/black
The wire descriptions are the colors of the Cat5.

Realizing the LED are diodes, I reversed the polarity of the VOHM, but no change in results.  The resistance readings vary from zero to above the 2k scale.

I checked an old PS2 mouse hack last night that powers a Tron spinner I have and the results are similar in resistance readings, but that doesn’t obviously help me figure out where/how to tie into this ball except to think I need to apply 5v to the LED and take signals from the outer two leads of the sensors back to the Wiz for the respective X and Y directions.  Okay, seems easy enough, but all the resistors have me concerned that maybe the LEDs and sensors don’t want to see 5v.

So again, I am hoping someone might be able to shed some light on how (if at all) to possibly attach this trackball to a Opti-wiz.

Thank you in advance,
Jeff

lilshawn:
to check a diode, you need to use the DIODE CHECK function on your meter.

and no, the LED will blow up if you feed them un regulated 5 volts.

even though they may run on 5 volts, the current needs to be regulated down to ~15-30 milliamps. and more and the LED goes PFFT!

if you are up to some hacking, i'd search the IC you have there on the bottom corner of the board and see what it is. perhaps this trackball is a serial connection and needs only a custom cable kinda like the old cisco console cables...


hsr:

--- Quote from: lilshawn ---to check a diode, you need to use the DIODE CHECK function on your meter.

if you are up to some hacking, i'd search the IC you have there on the bottom corner of the board and see what it is. perhaps this trackball is a serial connection and needs only a custom cable kinda like the old cisco console cables...


--- End quote ---

Duh on the diode check...  Should have known better on that one.

If it is serial, does that mean it won't output what an Opti-Wiz wants to see?

The IC is a 74hc14d and I found this http://www.nxp.com/documents/data_sheet/74HC_HCT14.pdf documentation for it.  Little above my head on the subject, though it does show me where the voltage input, data in and data out is.  Hopefully, I can trace those back to the eight pins of the RJ45.  But, how to tell which outputs are the X and Y since there are six?

lilshawn:
Traxsys is still around. perusing their site it appears you may need to interface it with a card to convert the rotation pulses to mouse data:

http://www.traxsys.com/OEMTechnology/SwitchesAccessories/InterfaceCards/tabid/1356/Default.aspx


--- Quote ---For trackballs, a range of interface cards that will convert phase quadrature outputs into mouse compatible data and allow easy connection to industry standard mouseports including PS2, USB and RS232.
--- End quote ---

you could still hack this to hook up to the optiwiz i'm not exactly sure how, as ive never used one. shouldn't be too hard.

hsr:
Thanks again Shawn,

I was just looking on their site and they have cables shown too.  They use Molex on one end and USB or PS2 on the other end.  Both (four different cables total) only use 4 wires total as 5vdc+, 5vdc-, signal + and either signal - on the usb or clock on PS2. 

They have a picture of cable that is RJ45 to Molex and it has six wires, but no technical document for it.

That matches (sort of) what I'm seeing out of my unit.

Here is the pinout for the IC from that pdf I linked above.  According to that document, 7 is the vdc-, 14 is vdc+, the remaining even numbers are outputs and the remaining odd numbers are inputs.

Here is how they correspond to the RJ45 connector on the trackball.

Because 7 and 10 are connected elsewhere on the board, I can understand the 6 wire cable shown on the Traxsys site.  Trying to figure out which pair of 2, 4, 8 and 10 combinations are the X output and which are the Y output is where I'm at now.

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