LMOX2, The Other Weirdest Mouse 

Hey, I'm the guy that sent that to Clint! Can't believe I got so much content out that silly mouse. Great video as always!

Seems like they had found two imperfect ways to create an optical mouse and decided to make them fight in a battle Royale fight to know which one consumers will prefer and then got destroyed by the actual optical sensor that arrived not to long after.

All this technology, yet they didn't figure out strain relief.

With the powers of LGR and Cathode Ray Dude combined, we can...uh...look at weird old mice! YAY!

I wonder if the neoprene shade is to block *sunlight*, which has lots of infrared. They might've seen issues with users working in sunny environments.

Mousing over a full desk in '96?! Nice!

After watching this, I think you might actually have things backwards on which of these came first. You're absolutely right that the Q500 is a minimum viable product, but I think that might be a product of simplifying what they learned from the other one. As you said, the neoprene insert on the mouse did effectively nothing, and it's a much more complex device. It may have been that they realized a cheaper way to do things that still sorta works and tried to simplify as a way to cut costs.

I love that "two of them" comes up so much LOL It's interesting that a button (or buttons) on the side of mice existed as far back as '96. In my mind I figured that didn't happen until the mid 2000s.

Thank you so much for putting up this video tonight. I've been having the absolute worst week with my mental health and you don't know how much it helps when someone makes a video in this style that you've mastered. Just allows me to switch off all of my anxiety and dread for that 17 minutes.

What about patent TW388829B, "Optical mouse and mouse pad" by Kyoung-Jin Kim? The original is in Chinese, but it seems to match the Q500.

I'm a South Korean guy and I used the mouse when I was young. And you can find red Hangul(Korean letter) with a rectangle on the box. 신개념 : new concept 광학식 : optical type 마우스 : mouse So I can guess that the company was in South Korea.

Now we just need Ken Shirriff to decap the chips and figure out how they really work

Going by the close ups, it seems like the 4 strands going to each photodiode are in 4x1 strips and not 2x2 bundles. This would make more sense for how it would work going across the grid, and it means the photodiodes and logic in the LMOX2 are working exactly the same as the Q500, sans the strobing lights. If you break it down to one row of 4 _horizontal_ strands for the vertical movement, because it's exactly twice as wide as the dots, if it's over the dots it'll always have 2 strands seeing black and two seeing white. So then the possibilities for what each strand can "see" are: ooxx xoox xxoo oxxo This means the horizontal position doesn't matter. No matter where the mouse is, as long as it's aligned properly it'll always only be seeing 4 white, or 2:2 white & black. The result is the two photodiodes will be seeing the same pattern of dark and light differences when you move the mouse vertically. This also explains why the alignment is so sensitive compared to the Q500. A small amount of rotation will cause that ratio to change. If the row of stands gets too far off you'll cease to get the same clear dark and light differences between the rows, and thus to the diodes, and it'll have a harder time understanding what is happening.

It's been a LONG time (like 20 years) since I did my research into weird mice, but I remember Iotek was a Chinese company that designed a bunch of budget oddball pointing devices. They have a few CN parents in their name. One day I'll find the weird ultrasonic 3d ring mouse I bought, due to the culmination of that research.

“You could make it as big as you want, like an 8.5x11 sh-“

Just finished up watching LGR's video about his new weather station hobby :) Such a nice surprise to see you two collaborating on this. Fantastic content as always here - I love watching your stuff :)

its possible that the lightshielding is against sunlight, wich compared to artificial light is VERY intense and full of infrared and other spectrums

clint is such a babe. I asked him if i could sample some audio and he sent me the raw

It's crazy how, being born at the end of the 90s, I remember using ball mouses and all other classic techs before they completely disappeared. These videos are kinda nostalgic to me. My siblings have no idea how it was to see movie rental stores go from VCR to DVD, to Blu-ray, then out of business.... Great content as always.

Your recent videos are seriously just... all amazing? Like, I love all of them, but this was great. Glad Clint was a standup guy. I really love seeing the camaraderie amongst tech youtubers :)

I was hoping for a followup on this and with out fail you and Clint came through!!! Cheers

around half-way through the video I was like "hey, you could probably turn an entire desk into a mousepad since it works using square dots" I was not expecting to see that become a reality by the end of the video. amazing content as always 👍

Try to print a mousepad with gradually larger or smaller gaps. So you could theoretically have a hidpi area of the 'desk' our mousepad and a low one

If you want to use this mouse, you can create a mouse pad with a slight Arc in the radius of your forearm so that as you move the mouse left and right and it rotates slightly it accounts for that to make it easier to use.

Clint is really one of tech GOAT. Also glad I've stumbled on your content CRD great technical breakdowns.

I guess the reason why they couldn't track X&Y on the Q500 is because the sensors don't just see 'Oh its on top' - 'Now its at the bottom' (Like in your animation) - I think that they really depend on the top two rows - middle two rows - bottom two rows (if not even more intermittent steps). Great vid as usual!

I recently came across your channel, and the content is not only well produced, but also fascinating! It's pretty interesting learning about video and the like, as well as pioneering yet failed oddities like this mouse. Thank you for being a brilliant content creator.

I swear back in the 90s I had a different kind of optical mouse that required its own special pad. As I recall the pad was dark grey with very fine reflective lines (wires perhaps) in a grid.

I think you are spot on about how these worked. I think the ‘forgetting how to mouse’ is just an AGC (automatic gain control) circuit adapting. And all of them plus the mouse systems do work like a ball mouse just the the quadrature signal ‘unrolled’ as you said. The mouse systems is much older, it was around in the 80s. Those pads were a hassle though. Heavy and expensive to replace.

Love that you tech peeps watch each others videos, and add on to them more information and stuff.

Those “light seals” might just be to make it sound more solid. I have done that on a mouse i liked but hated the hollow clicky sound on. Worked perfectly.

You're channel is awesome man! Always looking forward to new videos.

I think IO-Tek probably made the Q500 as a reference design and the LMOX company probably licensed the chip and tweaked the design to work on a better mousepad. IO-Tek probably showed off the chip a year earlier and both companies had started development around the same time to reach a 96 release date.

one funny artifact of the mouse wars was trackballs with optical sensing. it's an optical ball!

My dad actually had one of these. Never understood how it worked exactly, until now 👍🏼

Very happy to see that LGR shipped that mouse over to you so you could make this vid

Pretty sure i saw a bunch of those LMOX2s in the UK, or a very similar product.... I was working for a very dodgy computer reseller, who bought computers from companies that had gone bust, we refurbished them, and then they were sold in his shop. Now i know why we never got any of them to work. The mouse pads had been lost between their original office and us.

Great video as always. Really like the in-depth analysis of old technology! :D

solid video! the mouse pad desk gag and the chaos window at the end were perfect!

Can't get enough of your videos! Keep up the great work.

9:58 I think you have the directions of the sensors switched. If I had to guess at how it works then I'd say that they're basically sampling a whole slit of 4 fiber strands and then use the exact same technique as in the other mouse just with half the signal strength as only 2 out of the 4 strands will pass over the black squares in any direction. Edit: If it were to work in the direction you suggested then it would be possible for the 2 strand wide sensor to pass in between the dots.

The way you make these videos is like, fantastic I cannot applaud you enough for the effort you put into this stuff. I'm a pretty avid collector of old electronics so anything bizarre or weird that I can't find any info on either in a thrift store or on Ebay I'll be sure to send your way to see if it fits into these narratives you weave together in your videos

Damn, that was a smooth cut with the two of them joke. I was half right with my comment on the Q500! Also, I can confirm that the jitteriness is likely an issue with the poling rate of the serial interface. I've noticed the exact same thing happen with both Microsoft mice and a Genius WhiteMouse. Nice deskmat, too.

Amazing amount of effort in this, great video.

A ball mouse is also moving an x grid and an y grid along optical sensors, I think especially the version with the x and y pad is indeed just analog ball mouse tech remapped to a surface.

I love your videos! I predict in the future you will have at least a million subscribers. Keep doing what you are doing.

I love your style of production your channel is great !

The mouse having seizure at the end is great LOL, great content!

You have a very pleasant voice and intonation. Also a keen eye for interesting topics.

All three of you guys rock! Love seeing such great collaboration in the community! Hope everyone continues to be so great to each other. We all benefit from such collaboration. There are so many awesome and kind people in the retro tech community! I love watching Adrian’s digital basement, RMC, LGR, Cathode Ray, This does not compute, Mac 84, Action Retro, 8bit Guy, and many others working together to provide us viewers with such amazing things to watch! Love you guys! You rock!

I'm here for Mouse Discourse.

That’s really clever to use optical fibers to do the integration math to sample a larger area. Neat. I also bet that the one with more fibers was substantially more expensive to produce, being the high end of io tech’s offerings, and the other, as you say, the minimum viable product. And with that many fibers I would expect that more than anything, assembly would have been a much higher amount of labor. Gut feelings here.

Thanks, I really needed this today.

really glad i found your channel. you make really enjoyable content

TWO OF THEM.

Having used one of these in the 1990s I can add that you're absolutely correct with the release dates. The first "optical" mice that were not using optical flow type sensors (like the Microsoft one) used metal printed bases as well. I believe from memory, but cannot confirm that I may have used a Sun Microsystems mouse that used a metal pad with blue lines on it. Actually I found it... It's on the Wikipedia page. It was indeed a three button mouse from Sun.

Ah yes, the mouse desk pad… 1996 style

I love your channel since I found it, and fangirl in me here; but You look amazing too!

Some guy in the waiting room at the doctor's office was watching one of your videos as I walked by. Kind of a cool moment. Didn't say anything because you know, doctor's office. Hi dude from waiting room if you read this. This is guy with swollen face.

Your comment on rotating angles of mouse use reminded me of something. I used to have a Wacom tablet that included a mouse that could be used on the tablet. The tablet had a habit of slowly rotating on my desk as I used it, rotating the mouse tracking with it. Usually I would notice it and rotate it back before it got too annoying. One day I looked down and realized that the tablet had gradually rotated 90°, which meant that up and down were transposed with left and right. What’s crazy is that my brain had gradually compensated for it, and I didn’t even realize it had happened. Once I became conscious of it, the ruse collapsed and I had to rotate the tablet back to regain control.

I've never heard the phrase "very beige" before, but holy shitballs that is one beige mousepad!

I feel it's a bit of the other way round: Perhaps the Q500 was a cost-reduced version of the LMOX2?

The few seconds it takes to mouse again is likely just the time it takes for the auto-gain to find the middle of the signal, using the mousepad pattern as a preamble.

Great video as always! I don't have anything smart to add but I'm still commenting to boost that engagement stat for you

This is the greatest crossover episode of all time.

3:26 I appreciate this

Also I know that it seems like the sampling rate of those mice is fast but I'm pretty sure that if you move them fast enough that you're literally just skipping over sections of the mouse pad

A cluster of four fibres into one photosensor can be interpreted not just as white or black, but also as three intermediate shades of grey. Surely that's why a company would choose to make such a device in addition to the "budget" Q500 design.

The mouse desk was absolutely hilarious XD

I love the moiré patterns the mouse pad makes.

I love your videos. Thank you!

Two of them.

Try one of those passive Serial to PS/2 adaptors. The chip inside might support both protocols.

Great video!

The photo of the two kitties got my Like!

When I need to macgyver a mouse out of optical stuff and chunks of fiber, I should remember these videos.

I dunno if I'm making things up in my memories but I have a vague recollection of going to somewhere that did mapping or architectural CAD work as a kid (would have been early 2000's) and seeing these guys using a whole table with the grid dots on them. Perhaps this was a potential use case in industrial process that got ported over to the consumer side? The dots might have been for scale and nothing to do with the mouse - interesting none the less.

this compaq armada e500 laptop was one of my first pcs ever, seeing it again brought back so many childhood memories!

Oh man, I thought they gave up on optical mice in the 80's. Never knew these "modern" ones existed. I grew up using the 3 button IBM XT mouse with the metal pad, back in the 80's. So I thought the switch to ball mice was weird. The older optical mouse seemed so much more elegant with no moving parts.

My guess would be that the Q500 was released slightly later than the Laser Mouse as the design is more "modern". It also strikes me that the implementation changes - the separation of the two axes, the drop to two sensors, and the switch to a neoprene mouse pad - were all cost cutting exercises. Bundling two lots of 8 fibres together and keeping them aligned, applying silicone, and then sorting the strands to send them to the appropriate sensor would likely have been a fiddly labour-intensive manual production process, but dealing with two pairs that can just be clamped and easily poked into the correct hole reduces BOM and assembly costs considerably. On top of that you have a lower overall part count and a general reduction in build quality (e.g. the plastic tab instead of screws) which definitely suggests to me that the Q500 was a cost-reduced revision.

I bet those ICs are custom marked PIC (or other widespread) microcontrollers most likely in cheap OTP variants. This is common practice because obviously developing some special ASIC for things like these is economically impractical.

the neoprene inside may just be for sound deadening or something mundane like that... or flame thrower resistance

Very interesting!!! And you were right with the ball mouse rolled out! Those two mice work exactly like a fork light barrier with an encoder disc! Maby the front end of the recivers need some extra hardware to work with the slight variation in brightness, but i doubt that. You almost ever blast them with IR and there is not much threshold. 1 or 0!!! Maby the multiplexing of the receivers, need some extra stuff, but thats also not that hard even with jelly bean TTL stuff. If the standart mouse chip of that era dose read all 4 sensors at once, you just put two 2bit shift registers in front, tap of the clock and double it, flipflop the strobe and shift register and feed the original chip the samples of the register while it strobes the other side with double the rate. Boom done!!! (might take 100h of development to get right.... but IN THEORY it works)🙄

I love the contrast of your normal ending speech, while the mouse is literally going mental, frantically thrashing the window that says "my computer" trying to assert dominance. I think it was trying to say something.

At the end your laptop become possessed

3:26 ME AND MICHAAAAEEEEELLLLLL

3:27 This is a really satisfying and understated edit

i hope you never stop using the "two of them" meme, it always cracks me up

if there are multiple fibers running into one photocell, my guess is that they are not trying to sample on/off "bits" (with redundancy?), but rather sampling analog values to gauge the percentage of dot coverage. in other words, a sensor could discern if its site is on the very edge of a dot if the analog value is 25%. in this way, plotting an axis' sensors would produce a smooth linegraph rather than a sharp square waveform; which would be a lot more stable when trying to derive a statistical trend.

The middle mouse button functions are as far as I remember are a duplicate of a Logic 3 serial ball mouse I owned around the same time (possibly a year or two earlier). As far as I can tell/remember similar features were quite common for 3 button mice around the time as very little software actually supported 3 button mice (certainly windows 3.1 didn't) but manufacturers were looking for features that made them stand out above the "official" Microsoft Windows mice and adding an extra button was one of them.

Great video. Even greater comment section. It's a rarity on YT and I like it.

You should use a standard serial driver win Windows to see if the acceleration is on or off. It's a driver feature, not a hardware feature.

love the mouse desk

Heads up that I very nearly missed this video because of the similarity between the thumbnails and titles on this and the Q500; if this video underperforms on view metrics that might be one factor!

Weird how modern mouses don't care about rotation. It would be cool to have the rotation as an extra input in programs.

When I went to acommunity college in the 90s we had some similar optical mice. There was something in the college charter that they couldn't donate or sell any excess or obsolete equipment. So everything was used until it broke then thrown away. One day I was helping move things around the computer lab and we found a locked cupboard full of optical mice that cam with an optical mousepad. I'm not sure if they are the same. There were a lot of first gen optical mice that needed a certain pattern to 'move'. We put them on all the PCs and tossed the mice they came with. Everyone complained.

I knew it! I commented how I thought it worked in the previous video (just by looking at the bottom) and I was exactly right. Each line is "blurring" the whole pad in the desired direction, so it can observe one axis while the other one is averaged out. Also I don't think the serial port is a problem, just the controller which is probably just as slow in the PS/2 version.

imagine this guy, technology connections, and aging wheels did a triple collab

A mouse desk! how impress.. wait my modern Logitech mouse from years ago does that X-P Seriously though ,it is fascinating how the technology evolved and how they did so much with such simple sensors.

I'm having a moment just noticing the DNA Lounge sticker in the background! :D