DIYnamic DIYscussions: what are you working on?

Little more ambitious, but you could also try to build one of those fancy arm SoC ones, and make open source firmware for it so that people would have a reason to buy your board if you decided to spool it up later.

SoC Arm sounds pretty heavy for something that only needs to handle where the mouse is in 2d space and handle input from 5 buttons. I am not shooting that down, but I am a little sceptical.

that's what all the gamer meme mouse platforms are using these days. you could probably do it much more cleanly with a decent micro platform, but that would break with industry "standards." The idea would be to make like, the buffalo III of mouse boards, that makers would buy up by the dozens.

I don't want to make a platform. I want to make a mouse.

Yeah, and thats cool and all. I was just spit-balling. You never know when shooting the shit can lead to inspiration in someone more talented/motivated :)

I love it! Brainstorming is awesome. However, I am not talented in this area. Nor am I particularly motivated at this point in time. It is very simple: I have spent a fortune on high end mice over the years and not one of them checked all the boxes. I am annoyed with this.

Any recommendations on SoC Arm boards?

well, you're gonna want something with at least USB device, a couple of 16 bit adc channels, decent gpio connectivity, and enough memory wiggle room for generic class compliant driver interfacing + customizations. can't really give you a specific dev board, as I've never build a mouse fron scratch, but a good place to start might be to see what roccat and others are running in their mice (I say roccat because they do open source drivers, so you could get away with a low effort clone) you may be able to get free/cheap samples from atmel, and they have literally hundreds of models that fit the bill.

This is what I am after. Specific companies/catalogs that list components I would need.

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you're also gonna need a laser sensor, and whatever driver circuitry those require, a rotary encoder for the mouse wheel, tac switches for the buttons/wheel (though it'd be interesting to see if you could get away with arcade switches/cherry/bucking springs in a mouse) teflon for the bearing surface, and something to make the chassis with.

if you want to get the bare minimum of MCU development down, maybe look at something like the


it's dirt cheap and it'll let you get a feel for things

inb4 someone recommends you shove an entire raspberry pi or *duino+23 shields into a mouse

If this thread is for electronics only then please feel free to ignore this post.

Was looking for a laptop stand a while ago but other than the expensive name-brand ones non fit my expectations.
So I "built" a cheap one from wood and other stuff I had laying around.

Version 1. Added some stoppers made from small metal elbows, screws and rubber washers. Gave that to my mother.

Version 2.

Kinda the same with my headphone hanger. Glued a bunch of small wood pieces together, shaped them with a rasp, file and sandpaper, put some felt on it with hotglue and mounted them with magnets from discarded HDDs.

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all sorts welcome, as long as it's a sort of DIY kind of project

Current: Move current PC parts into my first ever PC's case
Make powerbook G4 into AIO PC
Restore Dell XPS 266
Setup SPARC machine
Move into sisters room :U (and paint it)
Podcast
Workflows post
fanfic
macbook get.

If you want really specific parts, my OG Corsair M65 uses

  • Left/Right Switch: Omron D2F-F / Omron D2F-01F
  • Misc. Switches: Omron B3F
  • Sensor: Avago 9800 (now Pixart ADNS 9800)
  • Microcontroller: Freescale MC9S08JM32
  • Scroll: Some sorta encoder

The microcontroller is just an 8-bit unit, so those are like a dime a dozen nowadays. Something like an Arduino-style system would probably work well if you don't want to spin your own PCB design. Only issue I can think of would be the sensor since they're fairly specialized, but I've seen the ADNS 9800 and even the Pixart PMW3360 coming from China on Alibaba and eBay and whatnot though. Sensors seem to be 4-wire SPI too, so they shouldn't be too hard to setup.

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Wow! Thank you so much. Specifics like this will probably save me hours of reading. A very good start.

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No problem, I aim to please.

If you do end up going for something like an Arduino-compatible board there are actually Mouse libraries available.

https://www.arduino.cc/en/Reference/MouseKeyboard

I'm not very good with computer languages, but I would think that if you can get the microcontroller to read the sensor then you'd be golden. Something like the Sparkfun board @tkoham linked or maybe on of the Metro Minis or Feathers from Adafruit would even be small enough to fit inside a mouse-sized chassis.

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got the new driver in. now for the 4 pole rewire and dressing up the cables all pretty like

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