Got bored and decided to pull my mouse apart so I took a few photos.. I'm sure there are a few embedded electronics people around here somewhere.
It is a bluetooth mouse comes with charging dock, laser sensor, capacitive touch scroll wheel, several multimedia buttons and its main selling point; it can detect where it is in 3d space so if you want to sit back and watch a movie you can just point the mouse at your screen and move the cursor around without needing to have the laser on a flat surface.
The design makes it nice to use as a mouse and easy to hold as a remote control.. it is definately geared more towards the HTPC control rather than gaming but I use it for gaming all the time and although the specs aren't great compared to modern gaming mice it still does a good job.
Anyway, onto the fun stuff
The metallic paint on the back has been wearing off for a while
Not much action on the bottom either, power switch, laser and dock pads
Well that didn't take long, 4 screws and were in. Pretty easy to tell it's not a normal mouse.. look at all that silicon
The main board. Some of these chips were difficult to identify, a couple didn't have public datasheets. Other things to note are; test points.. this thing is loaded with test points which would make hacking it a lot easier. This is a multilayer board, it appears to be 4 layer with one of the inner layers being a ground plane and the other 3 are traces.
Not much on the bottom, eeprom chip and a 3 state flip-flop.. I guess they thought it was important enough to get its own IC rather than just running it through a microcontroller. Also test points
This is the back of the capacitive scroll wheel, has it's own dedicated pcb with a capacitive touch IC? It's been relabled so I can't see what the chip is but considering on the back of the touch pad and it has Synaptics on the silk screen there is a good chance that it handles the calculations that work out where your finger is on the touch pad and send that data back to one of the main ICs
Finally this is the bracket which the multimedia buttons, battery level indicator and the piezo speaker are mounted to. Piezo speaker? Yep when you scroll it makes a clicky scroll noise.. maybe I'll clip the cables while I'm in here.
I wonder how hackable it is, they used pretty standard micros so it should be reasonably easy to track down the JTAG header and hack around in the firmware although if I wanted a big wireless gyro pointer it would be easier to just buy a gyro and build one up on a breadboard.
I guess I never use the multimedia buttons, if I could remap one of them to change the dpi or have an led flash when it's about to run out of battery (the battery indicator is right under my palm which isn't very helpful) that would be useful.
Anyway, hope that was interesting, I have some dev boards floating around so I might do a firmware programming/ intro to embedded electronics tutorial one day