The best mouse in the world

This time the post is about a PC mouse. However, it's ~10 years old so we can call it 'oldschool'.
This is the best mouse. Ever. Built. Really.
This one has built for eternity. It still works. It's not even scratched, not broken, the cable is still intact.

This is it:

It's small, light-weight, ergonomic, the cable is NOT 176451264 meters long and it fits my hand perfectly.

Actually, after 10 year the buttons became a bit worn, sometimes I experienced unwanted double clicks and unstable behavior. But other than this THE mouse.

So I was looking for a solution, this means I disassembled the mouse and checked the micro-switch inside. After a quick research I found that they are very standard switches and still available to buy. Guess what, 5 pieces for 1 GBP. And free postage! Wow, that's... a bargain.

It took 4 weeks for 5 pieces of new micro-switches to arrive from China to the UK but it well worth the wait. Maybe they were traveling using donkeys. I don't know, it doesn't matter at all.

So, I disassembled the mouse, this is how it looks like in pieces:

The screwdriver wasn't inside the mouse, obviously, that's just an extra decoration on the photo.

Grabbed the soldering iron and desoldered the micro-switches:

Then soldered the new ones in:

It's getting easier and easier to desolder/solder small items like these switches. There is not much tin around them and desoldering pump sniffs the tin off from the circuit quickly. Also, not much heating is needed on the connectors.

And I have a perfect mouse again!

(disclaimer: this post is NOT an advertisement and NOT sponsored by the manufacturer of the mouse)




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Today's music: Mouse on Mars aka. Maus af dem Mars aka. Egér a Marson

Amiga mouse

There were some pictures about an Amiga mouse in the previous post(s), now it's time to share the complete story.

I received the mouse with an Amiga 500, the seller mentioned yellowed parts and a partly-broken mouse. Well, it looked like I'm going to have some fun with using H2O2 again and practice with soldering some electronics. You can guess, I don't have photos about the original condition of the mouse...

Anyway, I connected the A500 to the tv and *boom* the magic boot screen appeared immediately and the Amiga loaded Workbench from a floppy disk in a minute. That was quite painless so far.

I had a testrun with the mouse to check its condition, well, the buttons were unstable and their clicking sounded broken. As an additional defect the left mouse button didn't work.

I was thinking, would an old but still working PC mouse be a good replacement? Let's ask the internet.
This was the best answer to my question, thanks to a user called Aidan on a random forum:

"Basically the problem is that a PC mouse has all the smarts inside. An Amiga mouse has all the smarts in the Amiga, and the mouse is dumb. You can either build the interface listed, or try and extract the quadrature signals from the mouse and push them down to the amiga."

Okay, then I need new knobs, and after a quick search I found them at AmigaKit.

 C64 C motherboard, Amiga mouse board, 2 C64 power switch and 2 mouse replacement buttons 

I used a basic 40W Weller and a desoldering pump to remove the broken buttons. As this part contains relatively small amount of tin the part were removed quickly and clean. The next picture shows and empty slot and the already inserted new button:

This one shows the replaced buttons together with the old stuff:

Almost ready:

Clean mouse case, right after 3 days of H2O2 and UV light treatment:

I had to cheat a bit with the case because the new buttons are higher and stiffer than the originals and the mouse case became too tight. Used a small plastic piece, cut from the external part of a cable, glued them to the bottom part. Looks like somebody is mad, right? :)

This was just enough to lift the upper part a bit and the buttons can *click*.

There is a small crack on the left button but overall the mouse is nice, clean, white and everything functions as it should. This is the last photo, taken right after reassembly:

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Today's music: Amiga demoscene compilation