2. A friend of mine at work did something similar to this by accident - he opened up our old, wired rollerball mouse to clean it, and lost a spring, which rendered the scroll wheel silent, and no tactile feedback either. Took some getting used to.
Posted at 1:06AM on Dec 5th 2007 by syco
3. If you replace the switch in the mouse with a N2222 (or similar) NPN transistor and supply it with 9v, your mouse buttons can be touch activated. Your hand conducts enough electricity at 9 volts to switch the transistor. I've done this to fix an old mac mouse in my lab (I was out of actual switches). The lack of tactile feedback is annoying, and in my case made the mouse look hilariously ugly... but it worked.
Posted at 1:45AM on Dec 5th 2007 by Sean
4. I once touched a mouse that didn't click at all, and it turned out it was broken because someone had spilled Pepsi on it.
I agree that that tactile feedback from the Pepsi "co-augulation" if you will, rendered the mouse undectable audibly. However, I found that the syrup like sucrose was sticky to the the tactility of my right index finger.
I like to put my mice in water, and clean the interior ball with detergent or other cleaning fluids such as milk, water, hydrogen peroxide, as well as ear wax to ease the lubrication of the device.
Posted at 6:37AM on Dec 5th 2007 by HotturKstylez
5. I tried this straight away, and it was so unbelievably annoying that I had to go back. Without the springyness and the click mouse-heavy applications such as web surfing are just a pain because you can so easily click on links by accident.
Posted at 8:14AM on Dec 5th 2007 by earl
6. @6 I bet that's just what you told your mum when she walked in ;).
"My mouse is broken and I clicked that link accidently".
Hahahaha *laughs at own joke*
Sorry couldn't help it :(
Nice idea but I think I might make something with seans idea with the transistor.
Posted at 8:36AM on Dec 5th 2007 by Ali Raheem
8. @4: Yes, there was actually a silent mouse featured on...I think it was a story on boingboing that linked to some geek shopping guide...something to do with 77, which I believe is where I saw a silent mouse. Or maybe I saw it somewhere else. Point is, I've seen them before, and they're being mass-produced.
Posted at 1:11PM on Dec 5th 2007 by Urza
9. I have a wireless microsoft laser mouse, and the scroll wheel is silent. There is resistance to turning the wheel some, so there is still some tactile feel, but it is silent.
Posted at 2:02PM on Dec 5th 2007 by BAF
10. But I like the tactile feedback!
Posted at 2:29PM on Dec 5th 2007 by PocketBrain
11. @11
Then don't perform the mod...
Posted at 3:39PM on Dec 5th 2007 by n3rrd
12. like the idea, just with i could have a silent keyboard aswell
Posted at 4:20PM on Dec 5th 2007 by mark
13. I have an older logitech wheel mouse and the scroll wheel in it was terribly annoying, The clicking was loud and "sticky" and the steps didn't line up with the scroll steps on screen. To make it go away I just bent down the piece of metal that rubbed the grooved inside of the wheel. Yay! Silent scrolling!
Posted at 4:29PM on Dec 5th 2007 by hack124x768
14. lots of silent taclile switches exists.
from a broken radio posts for you can salvage those types of surface mount switches.
they could certainly by glued to the base part of the original one, as it is in most cases in two pieces.
I think it could fit, thought the tactile feedback would be smaller...
gotta try this.
15. Plenty of consumer devices provide tactile feedback without "clicking" - most of these use rubber and plastic resistance switches rather than metal contact switches. Does your phone keypad click when you press a button?
Posted at 9:35PM on Dec 5th 2007 by devon
16. @16 Yes, yes it does. Motorola e815, and it makes texting pretty annoying.
Posted at 2:51AM on Dec 6th 2007 by k
17. mark: If you want a silent keyboard it's more complicated. Get yourself an old mechanical switch based keyboard such as the famous IBM model M. When you press a key on this keyboard, it connects two pins together. One of these pins is 1 of 8 possible rows, the other 1 of 16 possible columns in a matrix. I reverse engineered what each combination did, then built an N2222 based switchboard based on that knowledge (24 transistors). With a 9v supply, This allowed keys to be easily touch activated even through two people connected in series (about 3-6 Mohms?). Building the physical keyboard is trivial and very time consuming (hint: just look at the circuit traces inside the keyboard on the plastic sheets), and where I got bored and moved on to more interesting projects.
Posted at 1:30PM on Dec 6th 2007 by Sean
18. this post made me think of a way to quiet my mouse up without getting rid of the tactile feedback so instead of doing this, i coated the switch with hot glue and put a pieace of electrical tape between the actual sitch and the button works like a charm. it isnt completely silent but it certainly is 80 percent better
Posted at 10:21PM on Dec 6th 2007 by theportmeister
19. stuffing your mouse with cotton balls and using hot glue to keep it abay from the switches helps a great deal as well
Posted at 10:22PM on Dec 6th 2007 by theportmeister
20. I did this by accident (at first) to my logitech optical at work. I opened it up to remove some hair that had gotten stuck in the wheel. The spring and tooth mechanism that makes the clicky went flying almost as soon as I had it open.
It turns out tho that the wheel sensor has finer resolution than the clicky normally allows. It makes a big difference on applications that make use of the mouse wheel. It also gives you a natural momentum control. There's nothing to stop the wheel so you can give the wheel a big spin and let it coast when you want to scroll a long way.
I've since done this intentionally to the mouse on my computer and my wife's at home. Clicky wheel mice feel totally un-natural to me now.
hack a day serves up a fresh hack each day, every day from around the web and a special how-to hack each week.
All contents copyright © 2008, Hack A Day. All Rights Reserved.
1. With or without the sound, I'd think the lack of tactile feedback would be extremely annoying.
If he could find a way to maintain the clicking threshold of the mouse button, but remove the associated noise he'd have quite a marketable product there. (assuming he upgraded to optical)
Interesting idea none the less.
Posted at 12:42AM on Dec 5th 2007 by Wolf