Kensington Trackball - Wireless to Wired

[Siegfried Meier]

I have a bit of a funny question.  I have this brand new, but wireless, Kensington track sitting here that we bought a year or 2 ago.  I have about 6 other wired Expert Mouse trackballs in the studio and they're great.  The wireless one, however, not so much.  The batteries (which are C), drain like you wouldn't believe.  I was considering wiring a simple power adapter to it (don't care about the wireless aspect) which would probably work just fine.  However, I also wondered about simply removing the wireless aspect completely, and hardwiring it to USB like the regular trackballs.  Does anyone know what would be involved here?  Do I need to remove the electronics from the wireless portion and get them inside the trackball?  I assume it needs the USB driver circuit, which is probably in there somewhere...

Goofy, I know.  But I enjoy taking things that are just lying around and making them work, if possible, as opposed to just simply throwing them away.  Any thoughts are much appreciated.

Thanks!
Sig

 

[Siegfried Meier]

Ok, well it seemed like the easiest/best way to do this was to just give the trackball its own power.  I thought about a separate power adapter, but that's annoying.  So I decided to use an old USB cable, and a few diodes to drop the voltage to somewhere in the neighbourhood of 3.5 volts - the trackball would not work with 3V for some odd reason, even though 2 x 1.5V C batteries = 3 Volts.  Anyway, it's nice to reuse something that would otherwise never be used!  For what it's worth, you cannot use these wireless ones on Win7 and up anymore as they've been discontinued, but they work fine on a Mac with Mouseworks software!

Thanks,
Sig

 

[PRR]

> you cannot use these wireless ones on Win7 and up anymore as they've been discontinued

?? ?? It's just a mouse. Win95 would recognize near any bus or serial mouse. 98 and XP understand all USB mice... it is a standard interface, USB HID. Yes, proprietary features can be added and would need proprietary drivers for support. If your wireless can report battery level, that's not in USB HID, you'd probably need the brand-name driver. But basic move/click functions ought to work.

EDIT: http://www.kensington.com/kensington/us/us/p/1444/K64325/expert-mouse%c2%ae.aspx