.. and mouse

From the same notebook I got a tiny trackball. It has a logitech controller IC on it which I originally wanted to interface (because it appeared as a separate COM port to the notebook when it worked or so I heard and I thought it must have serial signals then) but since I found no datasheet(Logitech 330069-00) and any attempt at hooking it up to the serial port without a MAX(3)232 failed I discarded the idea. However I did have a ball mouse handy that I hated since the day I got it. It was a Micro$oft Wireless Desktop Wheel Mouse (and there's probably "intelli" in it's name somewhere) the worst mouse I ever owned. This mouse made me hate wireless mice, if I didn't touch it for 5 seconds it went to sleep, and it didn't automatically reconnect. So using it was 90% picking mouse up, pushing connect button, putting mouse down. Drove me crazy after a while. So it's perfect for this utterly pointless small project.


Pictures show the trackball and the insides of the M$ mouse

The rest of this entry has been lost due to a database wipe (ages ago)

UPDATE 2011-02-16:

Stefan Radke has managed to map the pinout of a Logitech laptop trackball from a Compaq Contura 400CX.

He writes: "today I managed to hook up the trackball just as a regular PS/2 mouse device to a PC. Just needs a PS/2 cable connected to the pins in the following order (pins from inner to outer ):

1 - GND, 2 - GND (3), 3 - Vcc(4), 4 - Data(1), 5 - Clock(5). Numbers in () are PS/2 pins.
Works perfectly."

Cool stuff, Thanks!

It's real close but not entirely the same design as the one I had to play around with. I suspect most of these will have PS2 (or perhaps serial) connections for the older ones and possibly USB for newer ones though, so direct hookup for use in random projects (CarPC, etc..) should be possible.

Good luck!