Making a custom trackball's easier than I expected! In great part thanks to the folks making arduino libraries for the parts, of course!
Still not 100% sure on a final design, but the electronics work!
Ball's on BTU bearings for no stiction, sensor's a PMW3389, and going with an analog axis for the scroll wheel which works surprisingly well after tuning a pressure curve.
#diy #trackball #arduino
What kind of scrollwheel are you using? (IIRC PMW3389 can't detect rotation around the point it looks at, and you seem to have only one of them, so it doesn't seem to be using ball spin)
@fontes Ah, so the stick's position controls the scroll speed?
@robryk Pretty much, though it still uses step-based scrolling like a mouse wheel, so it's still easy to do single-step scrolls to change weapons in a game or something. The pressure level determines the delay between steps.
I have the ball itself for smooth scrolling.
@robryk as I said in the OP, r I've set up an analog axis, like a single-axis analog stick. Works pretty well with pressure changing scroll speed. The analog stick in the photo is DEFINITELY not final, just something I had lying about lol
The paradigm's still that of a traditional mousewheel though, not the wheels you'd find on Kensington trackballs.