I have this Kensington Expert Mouse here (c. 1995), and I'm wondering
if I'm missing an external adapter box... it has a Mac-style DIN-8 for
a connector, and inside, I see 3 chips - an LM358 near the DIN-8, an
LP339N (quad comparator?) and a 24-pin Motorola SC417907P with an
adjacent 4.00MHz crystal resonator, clearly some sort of
microcontroller being used as a mouse protocol encoder. One
mysterious part is the optical receiver, an SD6150... it's an
acrylic-housed device with a visible silicon die, and 5 leads. It's
positioned to catch the light off of the marked roller that catches
light from an IR diode, so it's got to be something like a
multiple-element photodiode (they are marked "DTC1" and "DTC2"), but
googling isn't not revealing any hard details on the part. I _think_
I can see 4 "panels" on the die, so it might be a Common lead and 4
light sensitive patches that the board would use to turn a strobed
light from the roller into both phases of the quadrature waveform.
I don't think the folks that once used this had old Macs (perhaps they
did 10 years ago), so my first thought is... what protocol might this
speak and am I missing an external adapter to, say, a PS/2-style mouse
cable? Another possibility I can think of is that it is designed to
hook to a Microsoft Bus Mouse board (probably have one of those
hanging around here somewhere).
I did some googling on it and can't find any internals info or any
"hack" articles. Honestly, I could use this even if I have to extract
raw quadrature and do something with that. It's a single-sided board,
so reverse-engineering it is not impossible, but I thought I'd ask
first and see if anyone knows some technical details on it.
Thanks,
-ethan