A USB adapter for a standard Depraz mouse
The Depraz mouse is a rattling tidy fragment of gear:
Produced within the early 1980s, it used to be dilapidated in lots of programs, but to me essentially the most attention-grabbing used to be the Blit and its descendants, the DMD 5620 and others. (By the potential, if any individual who occurs to be taught this should always hang one of those terminals for sale… contact me!)
I just no longer too long within the past bought one from Ron Minnich. The mouse used to be ex-Bell Labs, beforehand within the ownership of the uninteresting Jim McKie. I admired Jim and used to be very chuffed to hang the mouse purely as an artifact, but I’ve moreover repeatedly mandatory to strive the suppose of one…
The mouse has a male DE-9 connector. This might per chance per chance presumably set apart you capture it speaks the the same serial mouse protocol all of us knew and cherished back within the 90s, but you’d be indecent–and the first hint should always hang been that it’s a male connector, when all those serial mice had feminine connectors.
I needed to post on the TUHS mailing list for back, but I used to be hasty pointed at this page, which told me that the mouse is a form of former-normal kinds which without delay show the outputs of their quadrature encoders over the connector. The pinout is:
- Pin 1: +5V
- Pin 2: Y1 encoder
- Pin 3: Y2 encoder
- Pin 4: X1 encoder
- Pin 5: X2 encoder
- Pin 6: GND
- Pin 7: Center mouse button
- Pin 8: Preferrred mouse button
- Pin 9: Left mouse button
The suppose of a DE-9 breakout adapter, I wired the mouse to an Arduino First rate Micro:
Getting the instrument correct took some work, basically because I spent quite a lot of time playing around with some slow code I purchased from Sparkfun. Once I threw that away and applied some easy common sense that good tests the falling edge on one Y-axis pin and one X-axis pin and figures out the mouse direction at that point, every little thing worked fantastically.
The code is at github.com/floren/depraz-arduino. I give it some idea desires to be appropriate to be used with any quadrature mouse, equipped you wire it up neatly; if I will be able to safe my palms on an long-established Macintosh mouse, I’ll bid if my guess is appropriate.
That it’s in all probability you’ll also bid a demo below:
How is it to suppose? Effectively, I’m still getting dilapidated to it, then yet again it’s positively a gratifying form within the hand, and the buttons hang a really pleasant clickiness to them. I intend to suppose it for a while on my work computer and bid how I admire it long-interval of time.
Bonus: Worn-normal Wine Capsules
I opened the mouse up lots of times over the direction of my experimentation. The principle time, I without delay noticed two issues: the red plastic shell used to be reasonably heavy good by itself, and that there used to be a well-known fragment of duct tape on the interior of the shell.
Uncommon, I peeled back the tape.
Before every little thing, I believed they hang been objects of beer cans, but then I pulled some out and realized that they hang been wine capsules, the official name for those objects of foil which shuffle over the cork of a bottle of wine. It turns out that up into the 1980s, these wine capsules hang been in truth made of lead, no longer the lightweight foil we safe for the time being. Someone had attach all of them the device throughout the mouse, presumably to add just a tiny extra heft–which I set apart web reasonably gratifying.
I talked about this on TUHS, and Norman Wilson rapidly spoke back that he might per chance per chance also simply hang been responsible:
The mouse with wine-bottle lead foil within the high might per chance per chance also simply hang
been my fault. I did that to 2 of them--at dwelling and in
my field of enterprise--because I learned just a tiny extra stress made
the ball tune better.
After all it’s no longer assured that Norman once owned this mouse, but since he did attach wine capsules into two mice while working at Bell Labs, I’m going to capture it used to be him. I now know extra in regards to the history of this mouse than most vehicles I’ve owned…