Looking for help in hacking a few things together to make a functional optical trackball. First, the backstory. Pics of things later after the camera battery recharges.
I've got this Microsoft Trackball Explorer 1.0 that has survived more years than was expected, but is finally beyond what I can do to fix it, without parts (and I'm not totally sure which ones, either). Since the parts aren't available, and mostly neither are the whole units (at least, for a reasonable price), I started using a Compaq/RadioShack wireless optical mouse as the only other thing I have around here with a wheel+button. (I also started a wanted thread for a trackball: http://endless-sphere.com/forums/viewtopic.php?f=8&t=28730 .)
But this mouse is proving to be a POS. Probably why it was dumped in the first place (I don't remember where I originally got it, but probably as junk when I worked at CompUSA). Several "little" things that individually could be lived with amount to extreme frustration in combination:
--if held still, it drifts up and to the left, pixel by pixel, sometimes fast and sometimes slow, even though the lens is perfectly clean, no dog hair, etc.
--it loses communication if not kept moving around, someitmes in a few seconds, sometimes after half an hour or more.
--the buttons don't always register clicks; I already replaced the switch in one just to test, with one I know works fine, and it still misses the same way--one out of every couple of dozen clicks. ALL buttons do it, so it is probably the radio setup losing data.
--the two "side" buttons are exactly in the wrong spots for my hand, and get clicked frequently just holding it. On a browser, these default to page back and page forward, so this is EXTREMELY annoying.
--There's no software avaialble for it anymore that actually works correctly (the only version I could find that recognizes this mouse sort of works, but doesn't allow assignation of buttons per-application, and doesnt' seem to actually reassign them in most programs, and crashes out with illegal operations every few hours). So I'm just using the basic Windows driver and it works, but doesnt' let me do anything useful with the side buttons or change the acceleration modes of pointer, wheel, etc. So moving the pointer around or scrolling with the wheel is incredibly hard, as it moves so fast sometimes I can't even keep track of the pointer. (other times, it won't hardly move at all, but that is the radio, I think).
--it sits there and strobes the LED in the optical sensor every 2/3 of a second or so, if you stop moving it for more than a few seconds. This is REALLY REALLY annoying, as the light shines out from the bottom edges and the clear back end. Already taped over the back end, but the bottom edges I can't do much about.
--it doesn't fit my hand, and the sensor is not under the center, it's off to the back right, so it is under what would normally be the pivot point of almost any other mouse. Thus, you can't just keep your hand mostly still and arc left and right for things, you have to move your whole arm around to do anything with it.
There's probably more, but that's enough.
So...somewhere I think i have an old IBM optical mouse with a wheel, but it has a cut-off cord, and I don't know if it was USB or PS/2 originally, as it came to me that way. But if I can figure out which it is, I can use it to hack together with my dead trackball....
I found that if I hold the trackball's spotted ball on the sensor on the bottom of this crappy optical mouse, it works well enough to read it's movements. So...I could hack the optical sensor on the mouse physically onto the base of the trackball's housing, so that it focuses on the ball surface just like the original trackball's sensor (which still lights up but does not respond as if it was reading anything when the ball is moved).
Then just attach the rest of the mouse's electronics to the bottom of the trackball, with wires from the switch points on the PCB to the switches in the trackball itself. Same thing for the wheel sensor--run from the optical interrupter on the trackball wheel to the PCB of the mouse.
If I had software for this Compaq/RS mouse, I'd be able to use it's side buttons to match up with the far-right buttons on the trackball, but since I don't, there's no point in hooking them up. The IBM mouse doesnt' have any side buttons, unfortunately.
If I had a *Microsoft* mouse with side buttons, I could use the MS software I already used for the trackball, and assign the buttons as needed, as well as the accelerations and such. But I havent' been able to find any MS optical mice at the thrift stores in the trips since the trackball died, and don't have any in my collection of PC stuff.
Buuuut: There's still one big problem I'd have to overcome: When the mouse sensor is used with the ball, either left and right or up and down are flipped.
I can fix either one, but not both, by orienting the sensor one way or the other. So I have to have a way to flip that portion of the mouse movement, preferably in a checkbox on software on the computer (unlikely to find this), before this hack could work. Any ideas?
(I have tried ebay in the past, and the auctions always ended up well over $150 by the end, even for "unknown" or "parts" units. 
