Well, I just spent the last 2 hours desoldering the IR emitter and receivers off of an old pc mouse. Then soldering in wires between them and the circuit board.
My goal was to extend them away from the circuit board so they could be manipulated by two independent knobs (instead of by the trackball). However, as it turns out I was a little over-ambitious. When I plug the mouse into the computer it is still detected as a microsoft serial mouse, so the good news is I didn’t fry the board.
The bad news is that I can’t get the board to detect motion. The problem could be that I used too thick a gauge of wire, or maybe it is not meant to work with extra wire, the individual leads and/or IR emitter receiver might be melted or fried, OR there just might be too much light in the room, and they only work if they are concealed in a dark container (like the mouse casing.
I’ll keep testing some of these things, but it looks like I might be out of luck… which saddens me deeply.
-EDIT-
I think I can rule out the wrong gauge wire, because I was just reading another mouse mod and they happened to use the same wire as I did. Melted emitters are still a possibility I suppose. I’m currently trying to test out the ‘complete darkness’ theory.
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