While track pads and mice dominate the pointing device landscape today, there was a time when track balls were a major part of the scene. In order to really sell the retro chops of his portable computer, [Ominous Industries] designed a clip-on style track ball for his retro Raspberry Pi laptop.
Starting with a half circle shape, he designed the enclosure in Fusion360 to house the guts of a USB trackball. Using the pattern along a path feature of the software, he was able to mimic the groovy texture of the main device on the trackball itself. Flexures in the top of the track ball case with pads glued on actuate the buttons.
We appreciate the honesty of the cuts showing how often the Pi can get grumpy at the extra wide display in this video as well as the previous issues during the laptop build. The bezel around the screen is particularly interesting, being affixed with magnets for easy access when needing to work on the screen.
Retro portables are having a moment. We just covered the Pi Portable 84 and previously saw one inspired by the GRiD Compass . If you’re more interested in trackballs, maybe give this trackball ring or the Ploopy trackball a look?
My wife’s old laptop (1993 Toshiba 386 T4700 something) has a clip on trackball.
Every now and then I look for a replacement floppy drive for it in order to be able to load a decent OS on it.
is it one of those that has a rubber belt in it like my Toshiba 486
Those old 386 and 486 Toshibas were neat machines. I preferred the later trackpoint models, but still pretty satisfying to clip the track ball on and off.
Gives me flashback to my old Compaq LTE386!
A modern version of that trackball would be really useful as a USBC accessory on a framework laptop.
That would be sweet!