[PaulJ] sent in this older, but excellent little hack to silence your mouse. Don’t like the click that your mouse makes? If your mouse has the right kind of switch inside, it can be quieted down with a quick soldering job. Just remove it, turn the upper half around and re-assemble.
A friend of mine at work did something similar to this by accident – he opened up our old, wired rollerball mouse to clean it, and lost a spring, which rendered the scroll wheel silent, and no tactile feedback either. Took some getting used to.
Posted at 1:05 am on Dec 5th, 2007 by syco
If you replace the switch in the mouse with a N2222 (or similar) NPN transistor and supply it with 9v, your mouse buttons can be touch activated. Your hand conducts enough electricity at 9 volts to switch the transistor. I’ve done this to fix an old mac mouse in my lab (I was out of actual switches). The lack of tactile feedback is annoying, and in my case made the mouse look hilariously ugly… but it worked.
Posted at 1:44 am on Dec 5th, 2007 by Sean
I once touched a mouse that didn’t click at all, and it turned out it was broken because someone had spilled Pepsi on it.
I agree that that tactile feedback from the Pepsi “co-augulation” if you will, rendered the mouse undectable audibly. However, I found that the syrup like sucrose was sticky to the the tactility of my right index finger.
I like to put my mice in water, and clean the interior ball with detergent or other cleaning fluids such as milk, water, hydrogen peroxide, as well as ear wax to ease the lubrication of the device.
Posted at 6:30 am on Dec 5th, 2007 by HotturKstylez
@4: Yes, there was actually a silent mouse featured on…I think it was a story on boingboing that linked to some geek shopping guide…something to do with 77, which I believe is where I saw a silent mouse. Or maybe I saw it somewhere else. Point is, I’ve seen them before, and they’re being mass-produced.
Posted at 6:58 am on Dec 5th, 2007 by Urza
lots of silent taclile switches exists.
from a broken radio posts for you can salvage those types of surface mount switches.
they could certainly by glued to the base part of the original one, as it is in most cases in two pieces.
I think it could fit, thought the tactile feedback would be smaller…
gotta try this.
I tried this straight away, and it was so unbelievably annoying that I had to go back. Without the springyness and the click mouse-heavy applications such as web surfing are just a pain because you can so easily click on links by accident.
Posted at 8:13 am on Dec 5th, 2007 by earl
@6 I bet that’s just what you told your mum when she walked in ;).
“My mouse is broken and I clicked that link accidently”.
Hahahaha *laughs at own joke*
Sorry couldn’t help it :(
Nice idea but I think I might make something with seans idea with the transistor.
Posted at 8:35 am on Dec 5th, 2007 by Ali Raheem
I have a wireless microsoft laser mouse, and the scroll wheel is silent. There is resistance to turning the wheel some, so there is still some tactile feel, but it is silent.
Posted at 1:55 pm on Dec 5th, 2007 by BAF
But I like the tactile feedback!
Posted at 2:26 pm on Dec 5th, 2007 by PocketBrain
like the idea, just with i could have a silent keyboard aswell
Posted at 4:18 pm on Dec 5th, 2007 by mark
I have an older logitech wheel mouse and the scroll wheel in it was terribly annoying, The clicking was loud and “sticky” and the steps didn’t line up with the scroll steps on screen. To make it go away I just bent down the piece of metal that rubbed the grooved inside of the wheel. Yay! Silent scrolling!
Posted at 4:28 pm on Dec 5th, 2007 by hack124x768
Plenty of consumer devices provide tactile feedback without “clicking” – most of these use rubber and plastic resistance switches rather than metal contact switches. Does your phone keypad click when you press a button?
Posted at 9:35 pm on Dec 5th, 2007 by devon
@16 Yes, yes it does. Motorola e815, and it makes texting pretty annoying.
Posted at 2:51 am on Dec 6th, 2007 by k
mark: If you want a silent keyboard it’s more complicated. Get yourself an old mechanical switch based keyboard such as the famous IBM model M. When you press a key on this keyboard, it connects two pins together. One of these pins is 1 of 8 possible rows, the other 1 of 16 possible columns in a matrix. I reverse engineered what each combination did, then built an N2222 based switchboard based on that knowledge (24 transistors). With a 9v supply, This allowed keys to be easily touch activated even through two people connected in series (about 3-6 Mohms?). Building the physical keyboard is trivial and very time consuming (hint: just look at the circuit traces inside the keyboard on the plastic sheets), and where I got bored and moved on to more interesting projects.
Posted at 1:29 pm on Dec 6th, 2007 by Sean
this post made me think of a way to quiet my mouse up without getting rid of the tactile feedback so instead of doing this, i coated the switch with hot glue and put a pieace of electrical tape between the actual sitch and the button works like a charm. it isnt completely silent but it certainly is 80 percent better
Posted at 6:11 pm on Dec 6th, 2007 by theportmeister
stuffing your mouse with cotton balls and using hot glue to keep it abay from the switches helps a great deal as well
Posted at 10:22 pm on Dec 6th, 2007 by theportmeister
I did this by accident (at first) to my logitech optical at work. I opened it up to remove some hair that had gotten stuck in the wheel. The spring and tooth mechanism that makes the clicky went flying almost as soon as I had it open.
It turns out tho that the wheel sensor has finer resolution than the clicky normally allows. It makes a big difference on applications that make use of the mouse wheel. It also gives you a natural momentum control. There’s nothing to stop the wheel so you can give the wheel a big spin and let it coast when you want to scroll a long way.
I’ve since done this intentionally to the mouse on my computer and my wife’s at home. Clicky wheel mice feel totally un-natural to me now.
I have an anger management problem. I once got pissed off at my mouse, and threw it at the wall. Somehow, this managed to silent the click of the scroll wheel, without losing the clicky feeling.
So, anger management problems aren’t such bad things. :D
Posted at 9:07 pm on Dec 8th, 2007 by Harrison
I did something like this to my little optical mouse.. it has the same kind of switches..
but how I did it is a bit different. using a needle I pried off the top part of the switch (without soldering it off) then crammed a little scrid of 2-ply toilet paper between the winging hammer part and the little hook-like thingy above it. this reduced the distance the little hammer has to swing and removes the second half of the clicking (the sound you get when you release a mouse button) while also dampening the first sound by 80%. tactile response is still intact.
the trick is in using a little bit of tissue (or cotton wool, both work) and carefully placing it in that critical wedge. I had to use a razor and tweezers to get it done right.. but it’s been working great for months.
Posted at 7:34 am on Dec 14th, 2007 by Ahmed Mahmoud
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With or without the sound, I’d think the lack of tactile feedback would be extremely annoying.
If he could find a way to maintain the clicking threshold of the mouse button, but remove the associated noise he’d have quite a marketable product there. (assuming he upgraded to optical)
Interesting idea none the less.
Posted at 11:39 pm on Dec 4th, 2007 by Wolf