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Anyone seen this trackball before? I can't get it to work

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PgrAm

Experienced Member
Joined
Sep 28, 2011
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Location
Toronto, Canada
P1040124.jpg

I saw this "PC Accessories" serial trackball at a surplus store and having not really done anything with trackballs before I decided to grab it and give it a shot. I first tried it on a windows 2000 PIII machine and it was recognized as a standard microsoft mouse, the buttons all seemed to work but the trackball itself didn't move the mouse. So then I took it over to my 286 MS-DOS machine I ran ctmouse which also saw it as a microsoft mouse, so I fired up a game and it was the same deal, trackball did nothing but buttons worked.

At this point I'm suspecting that this thing requires some special drivers but I couldn't find anything, interestingly there is also a switch on the bottom with positions 2 & 3, with 3 selected the buttons don't even work and with 2 they do. Anyone seen this thing before? Know any mouse drivers that might support it for DOS or Windows?
 
PgrAm said:
View attachment 56289

I saw this "PC Accessories" serial trackball at a surplus store and having not really done anything with trackballs before I decided to grab it and give it a shot. I first tried it on a windows 2000 PIII machine and it was recognized as a standard microsoft mouse, the buttons all seemed to work but the trackball itself didn't move the mouse. So then I took it over to my 286 MS-DOS machine I ran ctmouse which also saw it as a microsoft mouse, so I fired up a game and it was the same deal, trackball did nothing but buttons worked.

At this point I'm suspecting that this thing requires some special drivers but I couldn't find anything, interestingly there is also a switch on the bottom with positions 2 & 3, with 3 selected the buttons don't even work and with 2 they do. Anyone seen this thing before? Know any mouse drivers that might support it for DOS or Windows?
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I have a similar Logitech 3-button trackball that I bought back in 1987 for my 1000SX. Still works and all of the software is on 5.25 360 floppies.
 
I've got a C-H Products 4 button serial trackball mouse. It can be configured for a variety of hardware, including Sun. It is recognized as a serial mouse and everything works. If you can spy on the data lines for your mouse, every movement of the trackball should result in an output, usually at 1200-N-8-1. If it's not outputting ball movements, it's probably time to open the thing up and see what gives.

ch-products-dt225-4-button-trackball-pro-serial-mouse-1.21__63944.1490211958.jpg
 
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If the buttons work but the ball does not I would be verifying if the X and Y axis tracking is working at all since the same internal controller is registering button presses.
 
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So using serial monitor I managed to verify that the trackball was not sending any bytes when moved, but I did receive bytes for the buttons. So I opened it up can cleaned out the dust but still no dice. I was able to confirm using my phone camera that the IR leds were actually lighting up. Perhaps the IR detectors have gone bad? Or maybe the controller expects a command over the serial before it sends it's position?

I suppose I might have to do some more digging and maybe whip out my oscilloscope.

EDIT: I did some experiments with my TV remote pointing at the infrared sensors and I got the thing to spit out serial data and even move! This tells me that either the emitters have gotten dim over time or the detectors have lost sensitivity. I might try replacing one axis with ones from a ball mouse and see if that does the trick
 
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Well, I managed to make it work, but I had to modify the circuit. The trackball uses a zener diode to generate a 6.2v supply to run 4 IR leds in series with a 470r resistor. I thought that seemed a little weird, as it would run the LEDs pretty dimly. Indeed using my phone camera they seemed much less bright than my tv remote. So I dropped the resistor to 100ohms to run the LEDs more brightly and lo and behold the trackball started working!

I still have no idea how it worked in the first place.
 
What's the voltage of your serial port lines under load? Some cheated a bit on the RS232C voltage levels. A good "space" is usually around +12V and "mark" is about the negative of that. Some later implementations just used +/- 5V, which is only marginally within the standard. Also, the standard doesn't specify the current required, as RS232 is nominally voltage sensitive. Clearly that's not the case here--the trackball draws current.
 
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