Slashdot Mirror
"Red is Dead" Optical Mice LED Change
A reader sent us the
HOWTO for changing that red LED on your fancy-pants new optical mouse to blue - or, I suppose any other color. I think I'm fine with what I've got - although, the glass tops on tables does make using optical mice a pain there.
You don't really stare at the light under your mouse do you?
it doesnt like wood grain either.
-pubarso
Can you use a black light?
FoundNews.com - get paid to blog.,
However, upon pluggin my mouse into the computer, the logitech logo and mouse in general glowed blue!!! I was happy. Although the LED on the bottom was red, they had an *extra* LED that was blue for the logo and the *glowing* plastic. That made my day and it involved NO soldering.
But I kind of liked red. It wasn't my favorite color, but it was one of the better ones. :-(
I wish it hadn't died.
although, the glass tops on tables does make using optical mice a pain there.
Rub some sandpaper over the part of the glass where the mouse will be. Problem solved!
I do have to say that a blue LED mouse looks about 10X cooler than a red one. But it looks like this type of project will only interest serious modders who have some cash to spend.
How about black light on a white mouse pad? That would be pretty nifty.
-hero.
Now, a _blacklight_ led, THAT'D be cool! (Where's my disco ball and old skool rollerskates?)
"Draco dormiens nunquam titillandus."
I used to tease cats with red laser pointers. Think of how they'd react to an optical mouse on a glass table...
Do you live in the 80's? Does Don Johnson drive a Ferrari to your office? Glass Table Top!?!? Get some sense of function and style.
Cool! I myself wanted to write a long FAQ about how to do an analogous thing for traditional mice. i.e. how to use a whiteboard marker to change the ball to match your decor.....but got bogged down by technical details...perhaps someone can help me...
The law of excluded middle : Either I'm foo or I'm foobar
Next on Slashdot, a complete HOWTO on adding those leftover red LEDs to your car's window washer nozzles.
I mean, really. I know that we've been getting sillier lately, but this? Not exactly News for Nerds. Stuff that matters. Is it?
In unrelated news, a Japanese study shows another link between computer use and health problems. But hey, that sort of thing just isn't as k3wl....
You're special forces then? That's great! I just love your olympics!
Personally I would rather have blue to match the blue case on my computer but the mouse that I have isn't all that responsive as it is and if it gets any worse, it wouldn't be usable.
Maybe one of the mod sites could do a test to see which colors offer the best performance and which colors should be avoided.
How is it that one careless match can start a forest fire, but it takes a whole box to start a campfire?
and quit whining about your glass tabletops.
Do not meddle in the affairs of sysadmins, for they are subtle, and quick to anger.
I think I'm fine with what I've got - although, the glass tops on tables does make using optical mice a pain there.
I thought I was fine with what I had too, until I got a glass tabletop... and started working without pants. Now I just cry every time I look down.
Best Windows Freeware
Aw, MAN! And I was just getting caught up on all of my ridiculous case modding and converting my Geo Storm into a Geo Storm "Type R"...
(Like Heston) Damn you. DAMN YOU ALL TO HELL!
The problem is that this can seriously degrade performance.
What I want to know is: Would it be possible to come up with a mod design in which it switches between red and blue? (Red when it's moving, Blue when it's idle)
I noticed the light turns off when the mouse is Idle with my intellimouse, maybe this could be switched around a bit.
In this post about the lego cryogenic mouse mod.
'Cause that's what happened to the poor sucker... slashdotted before there were even a dozen comments posted. Poor sucker.
Stressed? Me? Of course not. Stress is what a rubber band feels before it breaks, silly.
I'd be worried that the detector might only be sensitive to longer, redder wavelengths. It would probably be worth checking on what component the mice use, and what its specifications are.
...is a how-to on making a stroboscopic mouse-led. That combined with a dayglo-orange mouse pad and some black-lights would make for the coolest trance-party deejay-PC around!
From the article: With the LED's now exposed, gently heat each side of the LED's carefully pulling on them until they are removed from the PCB. Take your time. This is actually the hardest part of the whole mod.
This shouldn't be the hardest part of the mod. Solder-removal braiding and suction solder removers are cheaply available and highly recommended. Once you remove the solder, removing the LEDs is much easier and safer. (No flying hot solder!)
The question begs to be asked. why?
You've just inspired me to do a cool CRT-mod. I will remove the ability to show red colors.
That will make my desktop look very elite. Almost as elite as your mouse.
Blue has a shorter wavelength than red.
The reason red LEDs are used is because they are the cheapest, as longer wavelength bandgap devices are easier to make.
The exception to this logic is infrared, since LEDs are typically used for visual indication. Infrared LEDs are useless for this purpose so manufacturers don't make nearly as many of them...
How many Slashdot'ers does it take to change an LED?
Answer: The ISP hosting the site is about to find out....
maybe once they find out that there is a 2.4 series kernel, it'll be a lot easier for them. i won't tell if you don't.
I did this on an older style Microsoft Intellimouse, using a light blue LED from Radio Shack. And they're not kidding about losing responsiveness. I couldn't play Counter-Strike anymore or any other games which required me to move the mouse quickly. The mouse would just lose tracking and the cursor would freeze on the screen. I swapped the original red LED back in, and what do you know, it works fine again.
I don't recall the URL, but about a year ago someone did a comparison of about 10 different LED colors they tried in an optical mouse, and found that red is the best. (Duhh)
Not All Who Wander Are Lost
Comment removed based on user account deletion
A great scene is a great film (and I presume a great play, but I was too young to see it at the time).
The line is, of course, from The Wiz, which starred Diana Ross (Dorothy) Michael Jackson (Scarecrow) and Nipsey Russell (Tinman). My favorite song was "You Can't Win", which was sung by MJ. It's basically the three laws of thermodymamics, turned into a song about pessimism.
The "Red is Dead" line comes from a scene were they first get to the Emerald City. Everyone's dancing around this huge city square that's all lit green. Everyone's actually wearing white, but because of the lighting it looks green. Then there's an announcement that green is no longer in and the new color is red. Lights change, everyone is in red, and the dance continues. A few minutes later, the announcement proclaims, "Red is Dead" and I think the color moves on to gold.
This film was made at the hight of the disco craze, and Diana Ross was very much a part of it. I was kind of suprised to see her poking such fun at the whirling fashion trends that came and went in weeks in the late 70s.
Somewhat interesting article about blue LEDs and the science that got us here.
;)
I'm green with envy, all you blue optical hipsters
Everything is blues,
:-)
all OsX icons are blues,
all KDE icons are blues,
all KDE themes are blues
half gnome icons are blues
half gnome themes are blues
the sky is blue.
the water is blue
my tv screen reflection is blue
my DVD screensaver is blue
Help me my eye are blues !!!
I'm very happy whit my mouse and the red led
Ceci n'est pas une Signature !
The faint glow of a red light while looking at pr0n just seems natural.
Trolling is a art,
Blue is great it is the new Red
"They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety." - BF
I'm guessing red LED's are used in the first place because of the cost. I read somewhere that red LED's are pennies and blue LED's are like $2.00 USD each. I probably read that on the Internet so take it with a grain of salt.
I'm wondering how many more blue LED's we can take. I remember the first thing I seen with them was the Sony PlayStation 2. If you go in to Circuit City or Best Buy, it seems like EVERY stereo, DVD player, TV, laptop, etc has blue LED's! I'm sure consumers like them, but I can see this fad passing soon.
If anyone opens up an old optical mouse, the kind where you need a special mouse pad, make sure you don't remove the infared LED and replace it with a blue one
Tape a mouse pad under the glass top.
The only problem is that the camera that is looking at the light coming back from the desktop is likely Si, (due to cost) which in most configurations has a sensitivity peak about 700-800nm. Blue LED's have a shorter wavelength. about 470nm for the ones I have, and Si photosensors have a very low response to light of this wavelength. (about 10:1 lower) This is likely to cause problems in the long run.
But, Hey, if it works, it's definately cooler with blue than red.
Truth isn't Truth - Guliani
.. when you spill solder all over your MS mouse circuit board and ruin it you have to:
a) Call Bill Gates a poopy-head
b) Tell everyone "if MS included a schematic, this wouldn't have happened."
c) Repeat.
Yes I'm joking silly.
Trolling is a art,
OMG, this passes as a /. story? With all the spelling and grammatical errors included!
Yes, red LED's are cheaper, but there is another reason, too.. They also want to use the cheapest CCD available. That's going to be a monochrome CCD that's sensitive to larger wavelengths. A red LED is going to work better on that.
With that in mind, an Infrared LED would probably work great with optical mice and their cheap CCD's.. maybe even better than red. You might have to remove an IR filter from in front of the CCD, and be wary of using them in a room with flourescent lighting, but it'd be good to try. How cool is an optical mouse with apparently NO light?!?!
If you want the "cool" blue look for whatever twisted ass reason, just use a blue LED and an IR LED in paralell. You might have to play with different led's/led voltages to get the right balance between a responsive mouse and the cool blue glow your riceboy heart desires, but again, it should work.
~GoRK
I can't see the actual LED on my optical mouse (a basic Logitech), but the light does glow through the case, which is a translucent plastic. And it glows brighter while it's being used, goes dim when not in use (powersaving feature, I'm sure). However, I aggree that this isn't exactly news, especially since I saw this mod on a mod site (can't remember which one) nearly a year ago, and I think at that time it was already an old article.
Against stupidity, the gods themselves contend in vain.
At compgeeks
My sig sucks.
Do you think that perhaps there is a reason that red works best ??? AFAIK opitcal mice work by imaging tiny features on the mouse surface onto 2d cmos ccd sensor. That means that the surface must be illuminated - so if the lens or sensor has a filter centered on the red LED spectrum, them any other color will work poorly at the filter dropoff.
To make your mouse look as cool? as all those Fast and the Furious wannabe cars you see driving around weekend nights with that eerie blue glow coming from underneath the chassis.
No leather, synthetics or steel please. Unspeakably vulgar materials in furniture.
About 9 months ago I was looking into doing the same thing with my mouse. And, while I found all sorts of howtos and faqs, all of them indicated that there would be a loss in performance. One site even had a graph of wavelength vs optical reception, which indicated that the mouse was most responsive at 770 nm. I think the default red LED is around 700 nm. At any rate, it wasn't recommended to go under 650 nm.
I don't know... If the LED doesn't light you say "I need to reverse the leads". Now, that doesn't make any sense. Also, what's a "soder"?
/.
More cool. Yes, from the fiery bowels of
Keep your packets off my GNU/Girlfriend!
Orange is the new pink!
You think that I'm crazy, you should see this guy!
I agree, mousing over USB instead of PS/2 changed my life ;-)
... like there's no tomorrow.
I have two Logitech wireless mice: one at work, one at home. I spend comparable amounts of time logged in both places (*sigh*). The one at home is a mechanical mouse, the one at work is an optical mouse.
My optical mouse has been through five sets of AA batteries in the amount of time it took my mechanical mouse to finish off one set of AAAs.
And you can't use rechargables, because these bad boys need the full 1.7 volts from those Alkaline cells -- the 1.3 from NiCd just won't cut it.
That's just nasty.
an octarine LED!
Yet Another Web Site
Doing mods Ghetto style or the drunk french way ?
Every time I see one of these articles, this one in particular, it reminds me of the blokes who spend thousands of pounds to put UV tubes under their cars
However, the main difference I can see between the two is that when the car modders have finished, they drive around town and OCCASIONALLY some girl stops, thinks its cool, and gets in with them, while mouse modders can only use their accomplishment to click on "sign me up" for yet another porn site
Here's a link for the same mod with a Logitech Mouse.
www.skybusiness.com/ntanner
I've done this, and it works fine. Note that there are two Radio shack LED's that are blue, one that outputs 2600 MCD's at 4.5 volts, the other 300 at 6 volts. I used the brighter one, and have no skipping problems at all.
Radio Shack
www.christopherlewis.com
If the mouse works, leave it alone.
Just be glad your not running one of the ball ones, that vacuum up all the crap on your mouse pad and jam and skip.
It's Christmas everyday with BitTorrent.
Red light has the shortest wavelength possible, which is why it is used for mice. A small movement will then correspond to a large number of wavelengths, making tracking the mouse's position easier. If you switch to blue, the longest possible wavelength, your mouse will be essentially useless.
Uh, wrong. Red LED's emit at wavelengths of 640-700 nanometers, while blue LED's emit in the 430-475 nm range. Red LED's are used because they're cheap and plentiful, not because they have the shortest wavelength.
Besides, even a high-res, 1600DPI optical mouse only has to detect changes on the order of 625,000 nanometers, so any wavelength within the spectrum of commercially-available LED's will do, so long as the sensor will pick it up.
I'm sure I read something a little while ago about an optical mouse where the LED(s) cycled through a bunch of different colours when it was idle, and when you moved it, it stayed on whatever colour it was cycling through.
Anyone else remember this, or (even better) has anyone else tried one?
Build boards not bombs
A blue LED doesn't help me get any work done. Sure, it may look cool and impress chicks, but even cooler would be an ALL KNOWING, ALL SEEING MOUSE, that wouldn't rely on me to push it around the mouse pad to get work done. It would do all the work for me because it would be that smart. And I would fall asleep during working hours.
It would be pretty damn good at playing quake as well, much better than me.
If I could find a mouse like that, well heck, then it could have a blue LED. Until then though, only red for it, until it gets smarter and starts doing some damn work for a change instead of just sitting there until I push it.
Easy guys, I put my pants on one leg at a time. The difference is after I put on my pants I make gold records!
I'd really rather see an article about changing the leds in my phone to blue. I'm pretty sure it wouldn't degrade the performance, and besides, I can't figure out where to put the leds in my Logitech MouseMan.
Signatures are for Nerds!
Water is not blue. It is clear and transparent.
Sith (evil programmers) use the red ones. Blue, green and now purple are used by the good guys :)
"Backups are for wimps. Real men upload their data to an FTP site and have everyone else mirror it." -- Linus Torvalds
Here's a link to Google's cached version of the page so people can actually see it.
: www.extrememhz.com/mouseled1.shtml+mouseled1.shtml &hl=en&ie=UTF-8
http://216.239.37.100/search?q=cache:pYdsFS2ayMgJ
Where are we going, and why am I in this handbasket?
Wouldn't an outside-of-the-visible-spectrum light work? The red gets annoying when playing at 4:am in the dark...
If they're going through all the trouble of changing the LED's to blue, why not change them into a superintelligent shade of blue!
Beware: In C++, your friends can see your privates!
The optical sensor (outsourced to Agilent) that Logitech uses has a response dropoff at 750nm.
_ white_pap er_91_EN.pdf?countryid=19&languageid=1
5 988-2793 EN.pdf
\Data Sheet on Logitech Optical
http://www.logitech.com/lang/pdf/optical
\White Paper on Agilent Optical Sensor
http://literature.agilent.com/litweb/pdf/
The site is still up for me but just in case, here's a mirror:
http://home.attbi.com/~bernhard36/mouseled1.html
http://home.attbi.com/~bernhard36/mouseled2.html
http://home.attbi.com/~bernhard36/mouseled3.html
though page one links to two and two to three fine on the mirror
In Soviet Russia...michael would be rotting in Siberia!
I have a Logitech optical/wireless mouse which works on just about any surface, such as:
- My flat, smooth, featureless desktop;
- The crap that usually sits on that desktop: plain printed paper, smooth & shiny take out pizza menu's etc.
- My trousers, in case the desktop is too full to move a mouse over.
- My cats! One is extremely black and short-haired, the other a multicolor longhaired one. The mouse works reasonably well on either of them, when one of them lies down on the only clear spot on my desk.
- Wood grain of any description.
Get a decent brand optical mouse, it is worth the higher price.
If construction was anything like programming, an incorrectly fitted lock would bring down the entire building...
you guys worry about the color of the LED's in your mouses while the rest of us who still have jobs will worry about slightly more important things.
Man, how pathetically superficial can you get?
quite entertaining that a physics genius as you self proclaim knows nothing about light and wavelengths.
Red and Infrared are the absolute slowest of the light and hence the longest wavelengths... this is why you get something called a red shift when objects travel away from you at high speed.
Blue being just below violet and being at the top of the visible spectrum have the absolute shortest wavelength just before ultraviolet. This give you a blue shift for objects travelling toward you at high speed.
Note when I mean high speed, I am talking about thousands upon thousands upon thousands of miles per hour.. none of this paltry human achieveable speeds... Being a physics genius you know this....
the color of the light has nothing to do with tracking, nor does the optical mouse work anything like you think (read that as assume as you obviousally never looked up how they actually work). Please, please, oh please... if you want to have the audacity as touting that you are any kind of genius do not spew forth fecies.... it make you look bad.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
I don't understand how this can just work, you may be able to swap for a yellow or green LED, but a blue LED has a much higher activation voltage, which would mean that either the red LED was being overdriven, or there's a chip in charge of changing the voltage somehow because it was designed to handle other color LEDs as well. The blue LED should be really dim if the voltage is for a red LED (GaAS).
I see this as a troll, but it still needs to be addressed.
/. for quite a while now. I'm a geek, and I was interested in the article.
How the heck did this get modded to 5? It's offtopic, and trollish. While I don't disagree that this story is not exactly the most important thing in the world, these sorts of things have been listed on
If you're not interested then ignore it, don't gripe to everybody else that you don't care.
Ben
Well, I've never bought LEDs from them, but I know they have a pretty good selection of VERY bright LEDs of practically any color.
http://hosfelt.com/en-us/dept_54.html
I am considering hanging myself by my cordless mouse.
Optical mice tech would be great if used in optical trackballs (or tracklights), it would be most useful on notebooks, since, so far, there hasn't been a decent internal pointing device on those.
Of course, you could get blind without careful placement...
Obviously this replacement worked for the story's author, but there is a technical point I haven't seen raised yet: Blue LED's have a much higher forward voltage drop than red LED's, and will often not turn on all the way in a circuit designed for red LED's.
The typical red LED circuit is a resistor connected to 5 volts (sometimes 3.3) in series with the LED. The resistor limits the current that can pass through the LED. The value of the resistor is based on some typical forward voltage across the LED. That is, the 5 volts will end up being partially across the resistor, and partially across the LED. The resistor is calculated so that the typical voltage drop will yield the desired current.
The voltage drop on a red LED is about 1 or 1.5 volts or something (I don't remember exactly) but blue LED's ca drop around 3 or 4 volts (IIRC). This throws off the calculations used in selecting a current-limiting resistor for the typical (red) LED circuit. A 3.3 volt circuit might not even turn a blue LED on at all.
The best way to turn on a blue LED is to put it in series with a simple current source (this can just be one matched pair of transistors with a current setting resistor on one of them) or, when possible, to use 12 volts with a current-limiting resistor in series.
Green and yellow are close enough to red that they don't pose a problem.
MM
--
By including this sig, the copyright holders of this work or collection unreservedly place it in the public domain.
I ran across this . Its a really cool mouse that has 24(!) user selectable LED colors. You change the color by hitting a switch on the mouse. Now that's cool. Next is to have a red, green and blue LED with variabe instensities...
Sig removed because it was obnoxious
Red was the color of the first LEDs, which is why it's still the cheapest (though marginally). Therefore they also have the longest development history. More importantly, long-wavelength semiconductors are usually more efficient -- not that this makes any difference in desktop systems though.
--
If you moderate this, then your children will be next.
In other words, this article is: Slashdot - How to Change a Lightbulb!
Photos of bits of the past hiding in the present: afiler.com
I suck.
What I want to do is make my Logitech Wheel Mouse Optical not dim after being idle for 1 second. Anybody have any suggestions?
He's not a physics genius. He's a troll, started by some guy on Kuro5hin a while ago. Go ahead and check his previous comments; they're all trolls.
Blue is the new high-tech color. As well as titanium. I read that somewhere.
;)
Must be because of the new PowerBook and Aqua.
mbbac
I have just checked around some of the well known UK suppliers (Maplin Electronics and RS Electronics) to find these ultra bright LED's in blue, but I will be damned if I can find em.
The very brightest I saw was 2000MCD - and that was being sold as the highest brightness at nearly $7US for a single LED.
Suggestions on where to buy from please?
Thanks!
"Hey! Unless this is a nude love-in, get the hell off my property!!"
When I tried to look at the mod, I received this message:
"This site is shutdown temporarily due to the slashdot effect."
First time I've seen a response rather than a timeout when someone was slashdotted.
----------
perl -e 'print(pack("H*","646176652e7761676e657240676d616
Now if they just had a beowulf cluster of those blue mice...
Duke
FreeBSD: Nothing runs like a daemon with a pitch fork.
"This site is shutdown temporarily due to the slashdot effect."
man, couldn't they just provide a list of mirrors instead?
I think I'm fine with what I've got - although, the glass tops on tables does make using optical mice a pain there.
"There"? Is he talking about what I think he's talking about?
Anyone gt a mirror?
http://216.239.51.100/search?q=cache:pYdsFS2ayMgJ: www.extrememhz.com/mouseled1.shtml+mouse+led+site: http://www.extrememhz.com&hl=en&ie=UTF-8
a hrefs are for the weak
Red would be Novell's Color. And Netware still rules, even if their marketing sucks (do they have any?) It'll be another decade before anything works as well as NDS.
I'm not sure how to get Black, Yellow, and White lights on the thing to symbolize Tux. But judging by how much my kids like the penguin, I'm sure there's a market for a mouse that looks like a penguin, or a mouse that shines a penguin beneath itself like a Batman Signal shining into the night... Heck, they could flip the thing upside down, and it could double as a nightlight.
Optical Mouse LED Replacement Guide
I've always changed them. Some of the fun color's I've used: The logitec dual-sensor: blue and gree Old logitec optical (with blue glowing logo): white New logitec opticals: blue And one more I did just to see if it would work: an Infrared LED (from a remote control) in one of the newer Logitec opticals. It's great, make people think that your mouse's light is burned out, but somehow still works fine.
I do have to say that a blue LED mouse looks about 10X cooler than a red one.
Here's Why
After reading this article yesterday, I pondered changing the LED in my mouse. Has slashdot implmented some sort of psychic cookies or something?
Life is the leading cause of death in America.
In a few years all red leds in new products will be replaced by "cool" blue ones. Red will be the new blue, and you will be cool once again with your crappy old red led.
Even better, just hold on to your old non-optical mouse and everybody will be in envy of your retro-look mouse!
The obvious reason NOT to do this.
On submarines and ships, they used to have only red lights inside when it was dark (or the person who had to go outside would wear red goggles inside). This was to preserve the ability to see detail in the dark. The eye's light sensors are able to recover quickly from red light, less so from other wavelengths.
Remember this at your next dimly-lit LAN party, where you've modded your computer and mouse with blue LEDs. And don't blame me when you trip and fall on the way to the fridge for another Mountain Dew. Or get fragged by someone you never saw, because your dark sensitivity was diminished after staring lovingly at your glowing blue mouse during respawn.
...
This is a cool mod to do if you have a mouse with clear sides :D (The $12 Logitech model B12 comes to mind..)
On my Logitech B12 I desoldered the factory LED, and put in its place a cut in half CD-ROM passthrough cable plug. I then went and bought 1 of every color LED that http://www.superbrightleds.com sells. When I want to change colors I just pull the LED leads out of the plug and pop it out of its plastic holder/lens.
I've measured the voltage being delivered to every color LED when in the mouse: Aqua (max Vf 3.6), Blue (Vf 3.5), Green (Vf 3.5) and White (Vf 3.4) all get 3.35-3.5v Red (Vf 2.2), Yellow (Vf 2.4), and Orange all get 2.3v
All of these LEDs are rated 5000mcd and above.
Every color tracks just like the factory Red LED. And in some cases better! The White, Blue, Aqua and Green LEDs track much better on shinny surfaces. On the same surface Red, Yellow, and Orange LEDs just make the cursor jump around.
Really though, arent people getting as tired of blue LEDs as they did of red?
Im waiting until yellow catches on. Ya dont see any yellow LEDs, do ya?
"Eagles may soar, but weasels dont get sucked into jet engines."
go down so fast? This site is shutdown temporarily due to the slashdot effect.
I suppose "extreme" could refer to minimum.
You'd think they'd *want* a bunch of geeks reading this.
Maybe they could sell kits to change the LED color on your mice to recoup the bandwidth cost of a good slashdotting.
I have a small travel mouse from PCAlly - they also make the same thing for the Mac under the name MacAlly. The cool thing about it is that the entire shell is made out of the same type of clear plastic that Apple uses on the G4 towers, so the LED makes the whole thing glow red. Its a neat effect. It probably helps that they use a red circuit board as well, but it would be cool to see it glow blue :)
Understanding is a three edged sword. - Ambassador Kosh Naranek, Babylon 5
I just tried out a simple test. I held up my TV's remote to my Logitech optical mouse's bottom and held down some of the buttons. Sure enough, the on-screen cursor started jumping in a particular direction. Looks like IR works fine. Kewl, huh?
Check out Project Cryo.
White is where it's at today.
...I might break my mouse irreparably. And as always, I'd rather be Red than Dead!
--ducking--
I'm not a geek, I'm just a clever script.
Follow the link: More like blue wig, red arse, sorry led.
Oh and the song is by Eiffel 65. And it's titled "Blue".
And it is extremely incredibly offensive (to my ears) techpop from Germany.
Freaky... I was planning on doing this this weekend, when I go home, since that's where my soldering iron is.
On another note: "This site is shutdown temporarily due to the slashdot effect."
Does anyone have the same problem I do with the little "pads" on the bottom of the mouse getting air (pockets) and causing the mouse to move funny ?? It's terrible on my Logitech 3-button one I use at work; it's not as bad with my 5-button Logitech I have at home though (the work mouse no doubt gets more usage).
Um, IR is the best thing you can use.
All IR LEDs (except for maybe some outlandish ones, but none that I know of) are near-IR. Si isn't transparent to near-IR, it's transparent to far-IR (i.e. the type of IR given off by not-obscenely-hot objects). In fact, as others pointed out, most CCDs and CMOS sensors have their sensitivity peak in the near-IR area! (Note: This is the main principle that enables Sony NightShot mode. In most camcorders and digital cameras, there is an optical element that filters out near-IR light because it will utterly kill proper color rendition - In NightShot mode, this filter is moved out of the way, allowing more light in, which happens to be at the sensor's peak. Color rendition goes down the tubes, but recording something is better than recording nothing.)
retrorocket.o not found, launch anyway?
http://www.business2.com/articles/mag/print/0,1643 ,44549,FF.html
"Intentionally or not, Krell and others were capitalizing on an association between blue and high-end audio that dates back to 1923. In that year, product inspectors at German radiomaker Ideal began to daub a blue dot on earphones that met their standards. The mark became so identified with quality that in 1938 the company changed its name to Blaupunkt -- literally, blue dot. "
"Blue got another image boost in the 1960s, when McIntosh Labs, a top-of-the-line stereo components maker in Binghamton, N.Y., hired University of Michigan researchers to find out what color of light is most visible to middle-age males, the company's core demographic. Blue, they said, and McIntosh began putting blue-tinted faceplates on its pricey units. "
Huh huh, huh huh you said "smegma" and "balls" in the same sentence. Huh huh, huh huh.
Could one use an IR LED instead? Does any one know what the LED detector is in these mice? If so, you could possibly find a wavelenght of IR light that doesn't tramsit through your glass tabletop (which depends on the purity of the glass and any coatings on it) and BINGO...Optical Mice on Glass.
Today is a gift. Save the receipt.
As IR is where the peak of most CCD/CMOS imaging device's sensitivity is.
But for many reasons (volume, for one), high-brightness red LEDs are more plentiful and cheaper than IR. Red is nearly as good sensitivity-wise, but much cheaper.
retrorocket.o not found, launch anyway?
I had a mouse that failed in the x-axis. I opened it up and it started working. Apparently, the Infrared LED (invisible) burned out, but the IR reciever was okay. And the mouse worked fine with office lights as its light source.
Um, there is no such thing.
Infrared literally means something like, "below/before red". Theoretically infragreen exists... We call it yellow. Ultragreen exists to in the literal sense - But no one calls it that, they just say "blue".
Most imaging devices (Like the CCDs and photomultipliers used in machinery, including NV goggles) are most sensitive to IR. Also, IR is invisible to people without IR goggles, so if active illumination is used, it's IR.
Green is where the eye is most sensitive, but green light kills night vision. Also, red does not travel as far (This may be more of a psychological/eye sensitivity thing than physics) - Back in high school when I was on stage crew, white flashlights were *verboten* because the audience could see the spillover when they were used backstage. Red-filtered flashlights, OTOH, couldn't be seen by the audience.
retrorocket.o not found, launch anyway?
"This site is shutdown temporarily due to the slashdot effect." Hmm.... maybe we could try the slashdot effect on msn.com?
Ok water is transparent, and looks blue from the reflection of the sky, but the sky is blue due to water particles in the air and sunlight defracting though them. So water makes the sky blue...
I did this a few weeks ago in a fit of boredom at work after reading about it in some article here @ /.
:)
Since blue LED's have a voltage drop of nearly double red LEDs (~3.5v vs. ~1.9v), I wondered if it would be a problem. I replaced both reds in my wired Intellimouse Optical USB with blue 470 nm Nichias and the sensor appeared not to mind the shift of 200nm; it works fine. Nor did it appear to mind the ~33% drop in LED current, but as these are high-output blues, it's possible they are more efficient than the reds it replaced and are generating similar optical power. Or, the sensor isn't really picky.
My mouse has a red translucent base so I changed out the LED that illuminates that as well, hoping for a nice purple maybe, but the plastic's response is too sharp. No blue gets through at all. Maybe if I use more current....
This sig washed every five years whether it needs it or not!
My logitech optical (MS Intellimouse explorer ripoff) had a blue LED. It went well on my Ikea leather mouse mat.
So go buy a logitech one then...
Off topic rant.
How often do I see cordless mouse users mousing inches away from the corded sensor. WTF! Whats the point people you still have a cord comming out the back of your computer and now you get to create toxic battery waste. "Woo Hoo", indeed. Smooth move Einstiens.
That article is quite interesting. Provides a nice overview of how blue LEDs came to be, and how they came to be all the rage.
Also, a neat piece of trivia on how Blaupunkt got it's name is on the second page.
Tuus crepidae innexilis sunt.
"This site is shutdown temporarily due to the slashdot effect."
This isn't a HOWTO. Read the HOWTO-HOWTO.
It's more like a tutorial or informative web page.
Please don't mod me down!
I spent wednesday afternoon modding mice. I put a blue LED in my cheap ass logitech. I log onto slashdot today, and what do I see?
/. Mac Naysayers happy: the TWO-BUTTON Apple Pro mouse...oh...it will be a sight to see indeed...
In any case, I also took my beautiful white Apple Pro mouse and stuck a white LED in it, so that the mouse has a faint glow in a dark room, and the gorgeous white LED beauty from the bottom. Those mice, however, were NOT meant to be disassembled. Much cursing and yelling and glueing involved.
The next project, which ought to make the
"p2p stabbing is such a vast, untapped market"
About 2 months ago a bought the most expensive mouse I have ever owned. FredMayer's had it on sale for $10. The Microsoft Wheel Mouse Optical USB, in addition to the red light underneeth, has a *extra* red light in the back (or whatever is called the side facing you), just so everybody knows that it is optical.
And while the real light dims when not used (which is very cool, BTW), the decoration light doesn't, so it is on, bugging me, and consuming power, 24x7.
I want to remove that thing.
Use 2 leds at the same time?
That way you get purple! (Ok, slightly less bright, but it's cool alright!)
GAAH! MY PRINTER IS ON FIRE!!! PUT IT OUT! PUT IT OUT!
I got an iopty jr from macally. The mouse has a mostly clear body and of course, in the store it wasn't actually hooked up. I found the bright ass red LED to be annoying. So I purchased an infrared LED to quelch it. Works wonderfully.
Actually the resolution is wavelength-dependent, which is why all the manufacturers had their mice produced with red-LEDs. Red LEDs perform better with the optical mouse sensors. However, blue is only a 3% decrease in performance, so you probably wouldn't notice. If you push it up to UV, the performance drop is something like 70%, so the slashdotters who want to put a black light into their mouse will have crappy tracking from the sensor.
When apple was about to release their optical mouse, they wanted white LEDs instead of red, and I was supposed to test the performance, but they gave diffuse LEDs to me instead, which wouldn't be nearly bright enough, so red it was. In fact we showed them green, yellow, and blue, but they were worried about being able to buy enough of the other LEDs, so they dropped the idea.
Since I tested the things, I tried all sorts of stuff with the optical chips--different lenses, reading tiny text with the test modes (it gives a nice little 16x16 grayscale image), and speeding up the shutter. It turns out that you can overclock these things by 8x by replacing the ceramic resonator with something with a little more zip. My mouse now never gets lost in fast firefights on UT2003. I calculated that you could drag the thing from the back of a car going 30 MPH before it would actually stop tracking movement.
Seriously, though, get some NiMH or LI batteries.
"Da ist ein Technölüst in mein Unterpanten!"
Block one third of the video out pins.
Your performance might be 3% lower than with a red LED, which shouldn't really matter
For me, the red light is too reminiscent the evil and almighty HAL. Just try playing an mp3 of 'Daisy Bell' while staring into your mouse's red light. See if you don't start pulling out PCI cards and breathing heavily.
Or for repairing a broken duck.
Personally, I prefer using DUCT tape for most applications, including removing warts. Doesn't work all that well for taping ducts, though.
--Larry
Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by incompetence
I put a white LED in my apple pro mouse. Now it matches all the other LEDs that Apple uses. I even changed the mouse icon in system prefs to show a white LED... Then apple changed the icon to their new white mouse. punks.
thanks for the great laugh today
it was one of those good ones that make you hurt
no pain, no humor gain
Since the site is slashdotted, here's an alternative article on the topic. Note the date: Dec 2000!
I guess this isn't _that_ new of a hack.
It's a MS Intellimouse Explorer. It does not track very well on my wood grain desk, so I have to use a sheet of white paper as a mouse pad :(. This may be due to the fact that the entire bottom of the mouse is tranparent red plastic so the blue LED does not shine tho very well. The blue LED appears bright enough in normal mode and does dim properly.
My Logitech M-BJ58 (2nd generation optical wheel mouse) is confused by woodgrain too.
I'm sure it depends on your woodgrain. Mine is the fine light coloured ikea wood. Doesn't help tt it's quite new.
just have someone throw the mouse at you hard enough that that light blueshifts.
I wonder if you could use a multi-color led that adapts based on mouse state. Did anybody try that yet?
All these comments and I haven't seen a single cold war joke.
I already have one of those, l4m3r! My m4d l33t d0g chewed on my monitor cable so Slashdot glows blue! Just like my Dodge Neon Type-R's wheel-wells, j0.
Wouldn't it be better to find what wavelength reflects the best off of the material you are using as a pad, or refracts depending on how these things work, and change your LED to that? in theory you could find a wavelength that doesn't pass through glass smoothly and make one that would work on glass surfaces.
View a copy here
Mirror provided by Mr HOSTBOT
RudeDude
Perl/Linux/PHP hacker
... use a touchpad, you insensitive clod!
Red's dead, baby, Red's dead
I know this is slightly off topic, but I really don't mind red under my mouse. OTHO I want a mouse with more than 5 buttons. Let's say that 10 buttons would be fine -- and almost as easy to use. Does anyone feels the same ? And have you ever seen such a mouse ? (I took a look at Logitech site, but no 10 buttons mouse)
This site is shutdown temporarily due to the slashdot effect.
How many sites do something like that for the benifit of the people destroying their bandwidth?
I came acorss this mod one time and thought it would be incredibly cool with a blue LED instead, but I thought about it and the plexi used for the mouse wheel probably wouldn't be as grippy/nice feeling as the slightly rubbery surface of the wheel I had. I looked around and finally I found a mouse that came with a clear scroll wheel. it was the new m$ Blue Intellimouse. I bought it ($20 after a $10 rebate) and ordered some superbright blue LEDs. Once they came I hijacked voltage from the USB cable and put one directly behind the clear scroll wheel. It lights up quite nicely and looks awesome, Then I replaced the red LED in the back and the one for the sensor with blue ones. It worked fine and it was bright enough that the responsiveness didn't drop, but... all microsoft optical mice have the clear red plastic for the bottom. It glowed quite brightly when there were red LEDs in it, but i unfortunately discovered that the red plastic completely filters out the blue light. So the only light coming from it is out of the wheel, and of course the bottom if you pick it up. I attached some longer leads to the one in the back and and siliconed it directly too the little red oval in the butt of the mouse and managed to get a faint purple glow out of it. It still looks pretty cool, but it dissapointingly glows less. My TI-83+ Silver on the other hand glows very nicely with the 2 blue LEDs i put in it.
"Sic Semper Tyrannosaurus Rex."
I can see IR! I don't know if that makes using an IR led cooler or defeats the purpose.
For those who keep asking me, it looks white-ish.
You can't judge a book by the way it wears its hair.
Okay. This solution is kind of technically involved, so please just hold on tight.
1. Take a piece of paper, about letter size (8.5 x 11 inches) and set it on top of the glass surface.
2. secure it with tape or glue.
3. Mouse on new paper surface. Consider this a table-top surface-mount upgrade, if you will. This is the PaperSurface 1.0 upgrade, the six-second solution to most of my mousing problems.
I think this is one of those problems that takes less time to actually fix, than to mention it as being a problem.
Reinvent the wheel only at either a lower cost, greater effectiveness, or your own personal enrichment and satisfaction.
Don't know why tho :-)
Okay... I'll do the stupid things first, then you shy people follow.
[Zappa]
Blue is the new red!
Quid latine dictum sit, altum viditur.
Anything said in Latin, sounds profound.
First off all this mod costs under $5. A blu eLED costs $2 and all others are chepaer than that. All you have to do is buy an LED and find a friend who has a soldering iron. 2 years ago I change my LED to blue (cuz its 100x cooler and all my friends give me shit for it, yet they still want their mice changed too). As for the blue light itself, its bad for the resoultion of your mouse. Thats why they use red. But the coolest thing you can do is put and infrared LED in your mouse. Its provides almost the same amout of resolution as your red LED and it makes n00bs think that your mouse is haunted.
... it's designed to work best with red, both in terms of the sensitivity and power consumption. At least that's my understanding from a coworker who was one of the original developers of the chipset in all the Logitech and MS mice (although I understand M$ developed their own competing chip that they use now).
:-)
The chipset is manufactured by Agilent Technologies (the real HP spun off before HP was ruined). The original designers (coworkers) indeed used blue LEDs as well as yellow, green, etc. The first blue-led version I saw was one of the orignal prototypes (which is also cool because it is small -- about the size of a tic-tac box).
If you turn over the mouse and look carefully on the lens, you may see the Agilent "spark of insight". And you thought it was just a nifty icon that meant "this is where the light comes from"
--An Agilent Person
Agilent -- The only place where the HP Way is still in effect!
How many geeks does it take to change an LED bulb?
1,000= 1 to tell them how and 999 to say "imagine a beowolf cluster of these"
just because I don't care doesn't mean I don't understand!
Yet another Microsoft product showing blue most of the time.
I think this was on the Screen Savers sometime back in July or August...
Can't you guys perform hader mods?
.
Mod your mouse to do this
Have fun.
Unique.
http://216.239.33.100/search?q=cache:pYdsFS2ayMgJ: www.extrememhz.com/mouseled1.shtml+mouseled1.shtml &hl=en&ie=UTF-8
Sorry for posting in caps but as i read the comments it struck me as wierd that NOBODY even mentioned white LED's. Is there some problems with them (different voltage/consumption) or do the CCD sensors ignore white light? Is their brightness somehow impaired (i doubt it, but it doesent hurt to ask). Any insghts would be helpful and greatly appreciated as i have a whole ton of white ones (and frankly i wanna be original...somehow 300++ blue led's in my computer are starting to bore me!
Live for the present, learn from the past, and dream of the future!
> This site is shutdown temporarily due to the slashdot effect.
Ah well....
todays "geeks" are nothing but hot-rodders. "Modding" their computers to look shiny or overclock them for the sake of being "best" on the block. Pure mechanics. Racing for pink slips. Who cares.
People who are genuinly interested in computing do something else with their time. Sorry.
Now kill a commie for mommie
www.saitek.com save yourself the headache. this one is cool to because it will flash when you get email.
i have one too. nice 21 inch with no red.......damn thing and it aint l337
Back when opening up CueCats and modifying them to output unencrypted data was all the rage, I experimented with putting a white LED in one. Hell, it was free so if it didn't work afterwards, I wouldn't have cared. But sure enough, it still worked... Not only did it look cooler, but I found out it also gave it the unique ability of being able to scan RED barcodes, something laser-based and normal CueCats couldn't do.
Picture of White-modifed CueCat
I've also modified my share of mice, but I don't think they're as cool as my cat.
---
DRM is like antifreeze, to the MPAA/RIAA it's sweet, to the consumers it's poison.
OK, true, these modern optical mice don't use simple phototransistors but my guess is that they use devices based on semiconductors that behave like phototransistors.
Silicon phototransistors are most sensitive to near-infrared light. The closest visible frequency to this is red, which may explain why you see red LEDs a lot in photosensitive equipment.
That in mind, you may "see" (ha ha) good results using an infrared LED.
...or at least I'm told. From my readings, the reason that the performance dropps with blue LEDs is usually becasue someone just went to Radio Shack and picked up whatever 5mm blue LED they had. The problem with this is that the blue is not nearly is bright as the stock red diodes. Get a blue LED that is 3000+ mcd and it should work close enough to the same to not notice any diffrence.
"Infants flesh will be in season throughout the year." -Swift
I agree that blue is cool. But for backlighting and in a Mobile Phone I'd like to have a white LED backlight. Nokia has been doing this for a little while. It's a close second to blue in a lot of cases. More expensive though.
I changed the LED in my Nintendo to blue a month ago. I don't know if people are more shocked by the fact that my nintendo works, or that the LED is blue instead of the usual blinking red.
This also reminds me of the gameboy pocket with a blue(I think) backlighting.
-- speak for yourself, lefty
No, no, no... they speak of a right-handed guy. See, you have to hold the mouse with your right hand (as most mice nowadays are egonomically designed for the right and would be pretty hard to handle with the left), thus leaving the left hand to venture off for other tasks.
"this is a really good piece of cantoloupe."
1 0\/\/|\| j00
Ernest T. Slashdot, modding his case with some
duct tape and one Dremel drill.
Didn't take his pills.
Look at him dabbling, making his harddrive into a doorstop!
What a sop!
All the Slashdot posters, where do they all come from?
All the Slashdot posters, where do they all be-long?...
Wow. I never thought of that. that surprises me. I should have. Oh well. hmm. I'm thinking holiday colors.
http://www.zebpalmer.com
Tons of people will start to mod their mice to have blue LEDs. After a while, manufacturers will take note, and build all mice with blue LEDs. Nerds will eventually become bored with blue and move on to another color. There are only so many other colored LEDs, so red will eventually make it back in style. You're all a bunch of retards.
Thanks to disco, MTV, video games, Pokemon, Sesame Street, the last few generations have been obsessed with flashing colored lights. Now, cops are not known for their intelligence, but up to now they owned a monopoly on blinking blue lights. None of this bodes well for civilization as we know it.
http://216.239.37.100/search?q=cache:pYdsFS2ayMgJ: www.extrememhz.com/mouseled1.shtml+%22%2Bwww.extre memhz.%2Bcom/mouseled1.shtml%22&hl=en&ie=UTF-8
Nowadays, you walk along and you see a dozen dodgy little shops offering to convert your 8210 LEDs to blue (like the 8250), or white (like the 8310, which I have and is sweet as); how long before an industry springs up in converting mice LEDs to look like models they aren't? Or maybe adding a red LED to your ball mouse, to make it look more l33t ...
Daniel Stone
-
Green - normal condition
-
Yellow - abnormal, but not serious
-
Red - trouble. You should be doing something to make this light go out.
-
Blue, White - general purpose, no designated meaning. Use whenever colors above don't apply.
Heavy industrial equipment has followed these rules for half a century, as have IBM mainframes. Stick to this in rackmount gear. It makes it far easier to tell, with a quick look, what needs attention.Explain THIS
They broke the code!
Me too, have to take it apart every couple of months to 'clean' the microswiches and re-seat them.
mountvol \\?\brain{dbe069b1-65ae-11d5-bab4-806d6172696f}\h
IR leds give most output for the energy. I don't know if their CCD element is sensitive to IR thought. Many optical detectors are in fact much more sensitive to IR than visible light.
For adding (or changing) an LED in your mouse called Project Iris. Cheap and easy mod that looks nice too.
Large print giveth, and the small print taketh away
THEY ARLEADY HAVE THEM...
don't you 6.25 kilometers? you sound so smart and then you can't even figure out the metric system.
The primary cause of failure in electrical appliances is an expired
warranty. Often, you can get an appliance running again simply by changing
the warranty expiration date with a 15/64-inch felt-tipped marker.
-- Dave Barry, "The Taming of the Screw"
- this post brought to you by the Automated Last Post Generator...