Posted by AD on 23, 2001 at 1:01 PM:
In Reply to: Re: My 2 cents. posted by Fultra on 23, 2001 at 10:33 AM:
I wasted 4 hours of my life last night screwing with this thing and wasted a perfectly fine mouse and probably one of the steering wheel circuit boards. I removed the sensors from one of the axis on the mouse and then removed the sensors on one of the pcb's for one of the wheels. I then replaced the wheel pcb sensors with the ones from the mouse and ran small wires back to the same location I took them from. These sensors are very tiny and soldering to them was a complete pain in the ass. Well I plugged the mouse in and rebooted. For some reason my mouse was now dead. I tried turning the axis that I didn't mess with and absolutely nothing happened. I threw it down and stomped on it. The process took me 4 hours and it didn't work. There was really no brain science in what I did, so there is no reason why it shoulda stopped working. Perhaps I created a short when I resoldered but the traces looked separated. Anyway, I might get it out again later but that was frustrating. Chris, I'll email you.
: Agent Davis - I'm in Columbus too, email me and maybe we can ge together an I can help you. I've done pleanty of this when I was designing my spinners.
: As for Tiger-Heli...You're right, it is much cheaper to use a mouse. However there are some advantages to doing it with the actual Happs board. Which by the way, will work wiht the large encoder wheel that he has.
: The advantages are that you can use multiple devices (2 spinners, 1spinnner & 1 trackaball) at the same time. I have received tons of people asking if they can do this. You can't do that with a mouse hack.....well, never say never, but not anywhere as easy. But you are 100% correct. Cost is the major factor - its a trade off between a cheap hack, or a more expensive solution that gives you options.
: : : The encoder wheel on the Demolition Derby steering wheel is about 100 times the size of the mouse encoder wheel. it's about 3 inches in diameter. I don't think this will work mechanically with the mouse. I'm trying electronically except on the wheel pcb there are two led's side by side across from two receivers side by side. Each individual led or reciever has two prongs for a total of 8 - 4 receiver, 4 LED. I don't know what to wire these pins to. HELP.
: : I would think that a mouse circuit board would work, it would just need to be mounted further away. If the encoder wheel is too thick, you could remove the receivers and mount to a PCB and rewire to the mouse PCB. Nathan Strum illustrates how to do this in his write-up of the Cheep Spinner. (http://www.calarts.edu/~nstrum/macmame/files/spinner.pdf)
: : For the people saying replace the optics with Happ optics and buy an opti-pac: In the first place, you're now up to 17.50 for the T/B board plus 6.00 for the harness plus 40.00 for the opti-pac, so the cost is now 63.50 rather than 4.00. Also, if the mouse circuit board won't fit over the encoder wheel, the Happ optics probably won't either, so you're looking at buying an encoder wheel from Happ (under a dollar) and some way of gearing the encoder wheel so that it spins faster.
: : I am not knocking the opti-pac, Andy is very helpful and he could probably tell you how to wire the DD spiner directly to the opti-pac. This is not the cheapest option, however. On the other hand, I plan to use an opti-pac myself. 40.00 is expensive to hook up a wheel, but if you also want a trackball, rotary joysticks, spinners, etc. the 40.00 is balanced out by the ease of connection and the cost of individual mice for all those games.
: : Also, while I quoted Happ at 17.50 for the optical boards, Imperial has them for 10.50 and Andy Warne said that you could build your own for less than 2.00 with a notch sensor and a resistor, but I don't know exactly how to set this up.