Ditch That Boring Mouse For A Military-grade Trackball

June 12, 2013 by Mike Szczys 25 Comments

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.

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Building A Controller For MMOs

July 25, 2012 by Brian Benchoff 34 Comments

It’s a simple fact of gaming that controllers are more suited for shooters, while the WASD + mouse control of the PC gaming master race is more suited for real-time strategy games and MMOs. [Gabriel] wanted to challenge this idea, so he put together a controller combining the best of a mouse and keyboard for some hand-held RTS and MMO action.

The Keyball Controller as [Gabe] calls it is an amazing amalgamation of a 3rd party XBox and PS3 controllers, an SNES controller, a trackball, two USB keyboards and a ton of Bondo. The front of the Keyball features a WASD D-pad, scroll wheel, trackball, tiny keyboard and a few other commonly used buttons. The rear of the controller is loaded down with tons of trigger buttons and a few meta buttons that alter the function of other buttons.

The fabrication of the controller is absolutely phenomenal and certainly something that deserves to be copied. We’ve seen some controllers duplicated with a silicone mold and resin, so we can only hope that [Gabe] is looking at RTV silicone at the moment.

Cockroach Pimps A Sweet Ride

June 11, 2010 by Mike Szczys 36 Comments

This giant Madagascar hissing cockroach rides proudly atop his three-wheeled robotic platform. This project from several years ago is new to us and our reaction to the video after the break is mixed. We find ourselves creeped out, delighted, amazed, and saddened.

The cockroach controlled robot uses a trackball type input. A ping-pong ball is spun by a cockroach perched on top. The lucky or tortured (depending on how you look at it) little bug has an array of lights in front of it that illuminate when obstacles are in front of the robot. The roach’s natural aversion to light should make it move its legs away from that part of the display, thereby moving the robot away from the obstruction.

We’ve seen some bio-hacking in the past. There were robots that run off of rat brain cells and remote controlled beetles. But none of these projects make us want to get into this type of experimentation. How about you?

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Super Quick And Cheap Trackball

May 18, 2010 by Caleb Kraft 18 Comments

[Elgatoandaluz] has posted this guide on how to tear apart a standard optical mouse and build a custom trackball. He’s using a ping pong ball , mounted above the laser as the trackball itself, which seems like it would be a little lite, but functional. The case is scrap cardboard. We really like that you could toss this together relatively quickly and have a custom layout. He recommends using Sakasa Mouse for inverting the axes and X-control for mapping the buttons(direct download).

Wiimote Trackball Mod

November 12, 2008 by Joshua Wright 2 Comments

wiimote

Hot on the heels of their recent rapid-fire mod, the creative minds at AcidMods have turned out yet another useful hack for for the Wii controller. This time around, they’ve replaced the peripheral’s “A” button with a clickable trackball, allowing the player to quickly navigate menus without readjusting their hold on the Wiimote. With a flair akin to that displayed in their earlier projects, the team even took the time to add LEDs to the track ball internals. Check out the videos of the mod in action after the break.

[thanks mark]

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