12 Aug
2006
12 Aug
'06
5:04 p.m.
On 8/13/06, der Mouse <mouse at rodents.montreal.qc.ca> wrote:
In a standard Sun-type optical mouse, one LED is indeed infrared. One problem
they develop with age is that the LEDs dim at different rates and the IR LED
dims to the point of ineffectiveness before the red one.
http://www.bjnet.edu.cn/sun-admin/FAQ/F-comp-sys-sun/Q54-0.html
(unfortunately, the repair URL it gives doesn't work for me)
The other
optical mouse that requires a special pad came with early
Sun workstations. It looked a bit, well, holographic. It had a
bunch of dots in it that reflected different based on where the mouse
was.
Actually, it has lines of one colour running vertically and lines of
another colour running horizontally, against a shiny background. To my
eye, the vertical lines look blue and the horizontal lines grey; I
suspect there is a reflectance characteristic my eye is not capable of
picking up there, especially as one of the LEDs in the mouse is giving
off invisible light (again, to my eye). If you can find suitable inks, printing vertical and
horizontal lines
on a shiny surface should do fine - but beware that such mouse pads
exist in at least two and I think three different resolutions; while a
mouse designed for a fine-resolution pad works fine with a coarser pad,
the converse is not true. If you want I can approximate the line
spacing of the mouse pads I have, with a ruler or tape measure and
some careful counting.
Yes... in the case of Sun mice, there are two grid resolutions of
mouse pads, and, IIRC,
the coarser one goes with Sun3 and early Sun4-type mice (the beige blocky ones).
Later mice (bluish color scheme) used the higher-resolution pads.
While it may not sound that Sun information is relevant, Mouse Systems made the
vast bulk of optical mice in the ball-mouse era. What changed from
mouse to mouse
was the host interface. Suns need 4800baud serial, Amigas take raw
quadrature (one
should be able to easily adapt an MS Bus Mouse to work with the Amiga).
-ethan