Posted by Jon Warner on October 08, 1999 at 10:47:36:
In Reply to: 3" Trackball for $4 posted by Tom61 on October 07, 1999 at 19:34:22:
The trackball is made buy Disc Industries. The guy at the surplus place said the interface is a custom one which is unkown to him. He did not crack one open to see what was inside.
I ordered one of them I'll be cracking it open when it comes. So I'll have more to tell you later.
I did do some internet searching for info on Disc Industries and only found two hits. The following URL points to a very interesting page on input devices. (http://www.dgp.utoronto.ca/people/BillBuxton/InputSources.html) We may want to look at it as a source of info for other stuff, but unfortunatly all it does is mentions the name Disc Industries as a maker of trackballs. The other link was to a german site which I translated with babelfish and got the following not very useful stuff...
"HEIDELBERG (pi) - the dialog between humans and computer to facilitate the new control ball (TRACK ball) is type LT 200, of Disc of instrument from the hardware page, which is located in the selling program of the Teldix GmbH, Heidelberg. It enables the input of X/Y coordinates with two-dimensional control problems of all art. computer controlled drawing equipments or progressings (CAD, CAM), to automatic text processing machines, personnel computer or television play is typical application examples.
The control ball of 50 millimeters is accommodated in a small box of 83 x 83 x of 42 millimeters, whereby the ball is freely swivelling after all pages. Two arranged impulse disks measure the rotating motion right-angled to each other and supply to x and Y direction 430 of square-wave impulses each per ball revolution (TTL or MCOcS COMPATIBLE). Related to the cone scope that corresponds to a dissolution of 0,33 millimeters.
Besides Teldix supplies a further developed according to own specification from the program of Disc of instrument Inc."
The only interesting tidbit in there is the (TTL or MCOcS COMPATIBLE) phase. Anyone know what this means?
Jon Warner