Ditch That Boring Mouse For A Military-grade Trackball

military-grade-trackball

The bad thing about this type of hack is that now [Tomek Dubrownik] needs to cut a hole in his desk to house the thing. He got this military grade trackball working over USB. It’s old, and could be used as a blunt weapon. But as the video shows it still makes a great input device.

He found the hardware on Allegro — a Polish auction site similar to eBay — for just $20. The original circuitry didn’t make a lot of sense, but a bit of probing with the old oscilloscope let him establish connections to the encoders which are read by some TI 54xx parts. Apparently they use the same logic as 7400 parts but are military grade. He chose a ATmega32u4 development board for his replacement control board. That chip has native USB support so the rest is just a matter of passing data like an HID input device. His code even lets him use those pushbuttons to toggle between cursor movement and window scrolling.

[Tomek] translated his post into English after some prompting by friends at the Warsaw Hackerspace. Here’s the original in Polish if you’re interested.

[Thanks Sergiusz]

25 thoughts on “Ditch That Boring Mouse For A Military-grade Trackball

  1. I bought a bunch of Megatron 816 TC trackballs for $10 each on ebay a few years ago. There’s plenty of documentation available, including technical drawings to cut your own faceplate. You can supply your own buttons. They use some kind of standard serial protocol (other versions of those trackballs use PS/2, USB…) and worked with a handmade cable right away with Linux. They work well for a kiosk style application, but I just couldn’t imagine using them day to day integrated in my desk – they just don’t feel precise enough.

  2. It’s funny, my main computers I use day to day are tiny compared to that track ball. I can just imaging setting up a tiny screen, hooked to a tiny computer and tiny keyboard, and then pull out that monster as my pointer device. Great hack! :)

  3. For those of you who don’t already know. If its 5400 series logic, that means its milspec. Like a 7414 hex schmitt trigger inverter is the comercial version, the 5414 would be the milspec version. The 7414 probably costs $0.60, the 5414 may cost $60.00, just depends on the part.

  4. A coworker recognized this thing. It’s apparently used in air-traffic control. It moves a cursor around the track screen, and you can hit one of those buttons to highlight said track to display additional information and the like.

  5. I love it! No problem of durability there. Thats one of my pet peeves, the lack of durabiliity of mice, I cant even count how many mice I’ve worn out in the last 30 years. Bad choice of materials, too soft of plastic, cheap microswitches.

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