@@Fazer_600 I was being ironic. My dad showed this to me already in the 90s or very early 2000s when he already had some digital camera prototypes from epson.
I remember as a kid I was the only one who ever cleaned those mouse rollers. It's still incredible to me how people could use a mouse with all that gunk inside.
So many times at work I'd be helping a coworker and their mouse would hardly move. Can't understand how they could work that way. I'd open it up and remove a ridiculous amount of gunk from the inside.
Been there, done that, got the tee-shirt. I've been in IT since the mid 1990s and I remember opto-mechanical mice and cleaning both the ball and the rollers inside. I also remember my employer bought a Sun Ultrasparc 4000 and that was the first time I ever saw an optical mouse and its special mouse pad. I was part of the team which migrated the company's software, data, and employee login credentials from the previous UNIX system to the new Ultrasparc 4000 system. Solaris for Sparc. Being in IT, not only did I clean the mouse ball and rollers for my own mouse, but for company staff too.
I played quake with an old Logitech Trackman Marble. Sure you can come at me with your optical mouse but my trackball would never fail, especially trick shots with the rail-gun !
Once my mouse broke down and my only spare was a graphic tablet. The mouse of the tablet didn't work great for Quake so I used the pen instead. I had a **** of a good time until there was a hard tap on my shoulder and when I turned around there were 8 angry guys standing behind me each with a spare mouse.
I remember when I was in high school, the rollers in the mice couldn't be cleaned because some school administrator had decided it would be a good idea to superglue all the ball covers "to keep people from stealing the balls". so people ended up throwing the entire mouse in the trash whenever the rollers would get too dirty, and the school would just buy a new mouse.
What's stupid is that's actually a thing. I remember finding a few mice without the balls inside at school. Not many, but some morons actually stole them. Of course by that time optical mice were becoming popular and cheap...
@@AnonymousGentooman You'd think that, but probably not -- unless you're getting a volume deal on the replacement balls, it was probably faster and cheaper to just toss the mouse. And if you were really determined to clean your mouse, you could just unscrew the case...
This channel is like the museums should be. Less about staring at endless static and boring exhibitions and more about getting more knowledge and interest about how things were made in the past!
I went to the Ben Franklin museum and they explain everything perfectly and the history. I went to others that walk you through and describe the objects while history. Maybe you live in a place where museums suck. No hate btw. Hopefully your day is well.
@@squidslapper7328 most of them suck. It's usually about how well funded they are, but sometimes they still end up being very boring. I find it to be way more interesting to have a good guide person than an "interactive" wall if text on a tablet.
@@ChaseMC215Oh, him? He gets more freedom, he also dies from time to time. But over time, you could be good friends with him with enough time and paitience.
I worked in a school before optical mouses were common... We glued the mouse ball covers on so the balls wouldn't get stolen, so cleaning them required removing the cover. Fortunately it was one screw, and it really didn't take any longer than pulling the ball out.
I figured out the solution for the gummed up mouse in the 90's: I had a table where the mouse ball would slide. So I taped a paper onto the desk as a makeshift mousepad. Turned out not only could I also use it as a note/scratchpad, it also kept the mouse clean! The gunk would end up on the paper and after a few months it was dirty and full of notes, so I switched it. I kept on doing that until optical mice took over.
@@countzero1136 Yes, the newer "Laser mouse" overcame that issue. I used a regular old mousepad for a camera-based mouse that didn't like my wife's black granite desktop. Laser mice were already taking over, so seemed old tech that this decorator mouse (bamboo mouse body) used the older generation technology.
All of my smartphones detect it. I use them to check to see if remotes work in classrooms at work without needing to remove the batteries and check them.
Then TV turned to crap and we had to turn off the TV, because it messes with your mind. TVs became "smart" as the TV programming became more and more dumbed-down and misleading, even outright lying to us.
@@itszain6317 Well thanks. I remember "the good old days" when you could watch cool computer TV shows on TV. Computers were the new cool thing. Now computers have largely stagnated during the last decade. What does a modern computer even do, that a decade-old computer can not do?
What do you mean you didn't get a convincing answer? People have been hacking mouse sensors as really crappy cameras and explaining the same years ago lol. Here, this is from 10 years ago ru-vid.com/video/%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BE-bci7Gi05BNc.html
@@GoldSrc_ People have search results 'tailored' to them by Google. What you see - even at the same time with the same search - is most likely entirely different than what they see.
Regarding reading mouse data, just go into anonymous mode and google "arduino mouse camera" and you find plenty of results along these lines, which work faster that the one presented here. @@ProGamer1515 I've seen Google not finding some obvious things, but not sure it tailors the results that much to user profiles, usually it's things it just doesn't index properly for anyone or jumbles it with many other unrelated things as to make the results useless. But that's not the case with this in my experience.
You missed the problems with the Mouse Systems pad optical mouse. I know you couldn't try it, but it does not act like an optomechanical mouse even if the way it measures movement is technically similar. The optomechanical mouse moves in the orientation of the mouse. The Mouse Systems pad optical mouse moves in the orientation of the pad, which meant that while it was very accurate, turning your hand any amount, as you do naturally, or having the pad at an incorrect orientation would cause the mouse to move in an unexpected direction. For most people, moving in the orientation of the mouse feels more natural. You could work with it when you had to like on a Sun workstation, but I had little patience. Using a ball mouse and dealing with the cleaning of the rollers was easier.
Interesting. I never really had that issue when I used such a mouse back in the day. I am sure it happened but I think is similar to the lack of issue I have with the up and down direction of a USB. Just something a lot of people encounter that I never really did and the few times I had a slight issue it was so slight and took so little time to correct that I forgot about it. It may be that I also had a more advanced later version of the grid pad optical mouse. Something that may have used grid for the sensor but was more akin to a modern optical mouse. It was such a long time ago for me, so I am not sure.
A lesson re-learned years later with the Apple puck mouse - the mouse with no orientable shape. A courageous endeavor in pushing the boundaries of form over function!
However, you could really annoy the person next to you with a 90s Sun workstation by moving the mouse mat round 90 degrees. So now, up with left and left was up. Small pleasures but you got to find happiness where you can.
i used to always clean the ball. i used to always throw it in the air and catch it LOL it was cool but one day i realized there was a lot of shit on the rollers and sensors so i cleaned them and i realized what i needed to do
My dad is a technician, he would always pull the gunk out of the inside with a pocket knife so that's how I learned to clean it (not with a pocket knife, of course).
@@kruleworld That sounds neat! I use digital mice these days, but I must admit the rollerball mice have a special charm about them. Even if they could get pretty yucky!
Wow, what a packed and super interesting episode. Last year, I ran into those opto-mechanical solution inside a Mac ADB Advanced Gravis MouseStick (I) and had to diagnose it before it started registering movement. I made a lengthy thread about it in the allaboutcircuits forum. Basically, the light wasn't picking enough light because of scratches in the plastic film on plastic film contact inside the wheel between LED and photoresistors. I had to up the voltage feeding the LEDs to make the whole sequence trigger. Most people owning these joystick have developed this problem over time so these 'duds' are unfortunately getting sold on eBay and most people don't realize it's an easy fix by turning a potentiometer for a bit. I went further down the rabbit hole this year by getting inspired by a custom thumbstick joystick getting interpreted by a very small Arduino which sent back the same kind of quadrature data, but digitally, to an old Macintosh serial port, so that it could replace the mouse in a Mac Plus, 512k, 128k or even Lisa. I mimicked the design and tried to improve on it while also making a gamepad case, 3d printed. Our designs and choices are documented in the hardware section of 68kmla forums.
@@theaveragecactus He's probably supporting the 8-Bit Guy on Patreon. I mean, Technology Connections actually releases videos a day early to Patreon supporters.
Back then, it was always the rollers. Now, many of the balls have degraded to the point where the rubber has gone ever so slightly stiff. Just enough so that it doesn't quite grip the rollers properly, and you get tracking issues. I've found that the Microsoft Serial Mouse 2.0/2.1 are still fairly reliable.
@@mare65 I was wondering why they did 15x15 instead of 16x16. Maybe a reserved or null value? Or maybe it was easier to have a zero column (and row) where everything was offset relative to it. I don't know anything about engineering but this is fascinating.
If he has an iPhone, it probably won't show IR light. I've tried with friends' iPhones and it never worked. Looking at the very same TV remote or surveillance camera using my Android smartphone's camera always showed the IR light - the fruity phones I've tried never did. Assuming the TV remote had good batteries and was in good working order or the surveillance camera was in night mode. Ditto for elevator door light curtains. Where I live, elevators are required to have light curtains between the doors and typically, light in the IR spectrum is used. If an object breaks the light curtain between the elevator doors, the doors either remain open or, if they are in the process of closing - they stop and re-open. It is a safety requirement. Most elevator companies enable a feature called "nudging" whereby after a preset amount of time, even if the light curtain is broken, the doors will still attempt to close (albeit with reduced force, I think). This is to prevent someone from holding an elevator indefinitely while other people are waiting (on other floors).
Not having any "cellphone" (or any gameboy), I would simply use one of my old digital cameras for that type of task. Their sensors see infrared too, of course.
@@frederickevans4113 What? You mean iPhone cameras don't pick IR light? Why is that? I thought ANY camera could do that. Even my ancient VHS-C camera from the early 90s could pick up IR lights from remotes.
@@OMA2k I think the fruit company put a filter on their cameras, either a physical one in the camera's lens, or a software one in the image processing. It might be a safety/modesty thing following the Sony camcorder IR nudes/semi-nudes from the late 1990s. Going purely from memory, please research it. Sony had introduced a feature called "Night Shot" into their line of camcorders 📹. It included IR illumination to help brighten night time video recording. According to the story, no one at Sony tried it in daylight. In direct sunlight, there was enough IR light (from the ☀) that the camera could see through a single layer of clothing. After months on the market and millions of these camcorders had shipped, Sony was inundated with requests to explain how to use the x-ray vision feature. When Sony tried to issue a recall, most individuals and many stores were less than enthusiastic to return the camcorders. The next version Sony released still had the "Night Shot" feature, but it was disabled in direct sunlight. If I remember the story correctly. I don't know for sure, but I suspect that the Sony camcorder story might have influenced the fruit company to filter their mobile device cameras.
I figured out all by myself that it was the wheels getting dirty. A fingernail did wonders for scraping gunk off. SOoooo satisfying to remove that stuff.
Ya me too and then I taught the other kids and teachers that trick. Because teachers would only have like 2 or 3 extra computer mouse in the class, and when a whole bunch of them had gummed up some of us would get stuck with gummed up ones. Now that I think about it, the teachers sent the computer mouse back to IT for maintenance/repairs because hardly anyone knew about cleaning the rollers...
@@spacefightertzz The optical equivalent, getting a cat, dog, or arm hair stuck in front of the eye, and that's more frustrating to deal with, harder to get out, and lacks that sense of accomplishment. On the plus side, it isn't as sure to happen as gumming balls.
03:34 mouse roller gunk is some of the nastiest stuff ever. Thanks for taking me back to 2003 and cleaning out the mouse for my Dell Dimension desktop I made my first programming and gaming experiments on, lol.
I recently cleaned a few of mine up - definitely a flashback. Did you know, the balls in Microsoft mice, when the rubber coating is removed, fit into paintball guns near perfectly? :D
Pretty neat that you wrote your own program to poll the sensor, though there are already people who have done this. There's even a program called mousecam which lets you more or less "scan" with the mouse, so you can read larger areas by moving around the mouse.
7:58 "Now you'd think all I need to do now is read register B here, which is pixel grab." No, no I did not think that, let alone think at all when the data sheet was displayed..
Benjamin Lum its actually not too difficult to understand, its all laid out on the datasheet, for example take the register Motion at 0x02, so since its using a byte it has 8 bits, below the chart with the registers it lists in detail the bits and the fields and what they mean, like for Motion it says bit 7 (it starts at 0 so 7 is actually the 8th bit) is MOT which it says is motion since last reported which returns two values, 1 or 0, 1 meaning motion has occurred, 0 meaning no motion, with the rest of the bits reserved. What this tells us is that you can read at 0x02 and the 7th bit will tell you whether or not motion has occurred. If you’re interested in reading more for yourself you can find this particular datasheet at media.digikey.com/pdf/Data%20Sheets/Avago%20PDFs/ADNS-5030.pdf
You could save the image after each tiny movement and then compose all the saved images into animation. Viewing the animation will be more logical to understand what the mouse "sees"
Great video. I was the nerd in the computer lab that could do 'magic' things to mice by cleaning the rollers. Some of the kids used to get so worried when I'd pop the ball cover off and they'd see a flash of the circuit board.
I had a Mouse Systems Amiga mouse back in the 90s - absolutely brilliant at the time, so long as you kept the mouse perfectly straight! Angle it a bit and the pointer starts to do the Lambada.
@@AnonymousGentooman From what I understand, that's only for midroll ads. I don't have the timestamp of the OP's situation, but I (possibly erroneously) figured it'd be for the end of the video ("Thanks for watching.").
There was an old project posted on Hackaday where someone managed to used one of those sensors kind of like a scanner. Obviously the resolution from the 18x18 CCD was very low but the result was pretty impressive for what it was. It definitely blew my mind at the time. Unfortunately the link is now dead.
Little bit of trivia for the 90s kids: The analog sticks on the Nintendo 64 controllers used optical encoders much in the same fashion as old ball mice meaning they were mostly digital as the encoders can only detect a set distance from the assumed center in so many exact increments. But by being able to detect so many small increments of movement, it essentially "emulated" true analog control as far as the end user was concerned. Probably the only thing that gives it away is the very subtle "ratcheting" feedback you can feel when rotating it, that's the plastic teeth on the encoder discs.
3:58 If i don't remember it wrong the direction of the movement was always how the mouse pad was placed and not how you hold the mouse. You could turn the mouse the other direction but the mouse pointer moved up even if the mouse cable was against you.
Kinda reminds me of the Wii's IR sensor. At first glance it seems like it tracks IR light sources - which of course, it does. But how it does that is basically that it's a 128x96 black and white camera with an IR filter, and a built in processing chip that takes the 4 brightest readings, interpolates the pixel intensity values to essentially determine the coordinates as though it was a 1024x768 image, and then send those coordinates + a 4 bit brightness value on to whatever hardware you connect it to... I guess optical mice are kind of doing a similar thing...
@@AkhyarMaulanaPangeranWeb I would say, that the reason is latency: You can make a faster MCU when you seperate it from the sensor. And the faster the MCU can process the sensor data, the faster you can move your mouse cursor and therefore in games where the crosshair of your weapon looks too. Don't forget, when you have a 144 fps screen, your mouse must at least send the position data 144 times a second to the computer, so that you can move your mouse without lag.
Me: "What a great and interesting episode!" 8BG: "Stick around for the next episode, where I talk about the Mini-PET!" Me: "AN 8BG CLIFFHANGER, WHYYYYYY"
3:17 "The average person seemed to have no idea how to properly clean the mouse." Then shows how to clean it by using a Stanley knife to scrape the *plastic* rollers. Sigh, that is how you damage the mouse, not how you should clean it.
Very minimal 'visual' damage would show, would not affect the usability of the mouse. Source: Used to clean an old Microsoft mouse with a blunt Stanley knife.
@@TransformerCoil That "visual damage" makes the rollers pick up more dust and thus you have to clean it more often, creating even more damage. So it does affect the usability of the mouse.
Fair enough, but by blunt, it was really blunt. It was duller than the backside of a normal Stanley knife. Only used to scrape of the harder particles of debris and the dullness of the knife did not jab at the rollers. Did not notice an increase of dust collection on the rollers btw.
You probably have an Android smartphone. All my friends' fruity smartphones I've tried that with have failed to see the IR light. I have a Samsung Galaxy S7 and it sees IR (as did the GS5 and GS2 I had before). If you have a smartphone capable of seeing IR, that is one way to check the batteries in your TV remote. Pressing buttons: good batteries = blinking light, bad batteries (or faulty remote) = nothing.
@YOLO MAN It's not like there's a human on the other side listening, like in the movies. Your phone always listen to you, convert speech to text and send to cloud periodically, stored in your profile on the cloud at very little cost. The machines work 24/7, and the data actually generate profit for the company, so tell me why wouldn't they do it
I actually found the old rollerball mice a little more reliable, drives me nuts with optical that a single hair getting inside the case an infront of the laser will send it doolally.
@@bonkybonk_ow2793 Hes right, an optical mouse wont work right on a surface thats highly reflective or lacks trackable features such as patternation or contrasting colours.
