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Optical mouse pad pattern

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First post, by wbahnassi

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Hi guys, sharing my findings on old skool optical mice. Got my hands on one optical mouse GVC Litemouse in box, with its software.. but missing the mouse pad. Bummer, but I really wanted to get the mouse working.

Thanks to LGR and TechTangent's videos on the topic, I got to the idea of making the pad by myself. The key is in the pattern that the mouse is built to look for.

I noticed there are two kinds of mice: one looking for different colors (e.g. blue and black), and another that works with a black and white checkerboard pattern only.

I printed some test patterns as you see in the photos.. and for my mouse's model, it seemed the checkerboard pattern made it work okayish in all directions.. the only problem is that the cursor was moving too slowly, meaning the pattern was too big for the sensors.

The inital attempt had a 1mm pitch for the pattern. This was not good. So I printed two more tests at 0.5mm and 0.25mm pitches.. unfortunately my inkjet printer was unable to properly print the 0.25mm pattern, and the 0.5mm also came out a bit leaky due to printing high density on plain paper.

Still, upon testing with the mouse, the 0.5mm pattern made it work perfectly! So now I just need to print this pattern in high quality on photo paper and laminate it.

Hopefully this will help people with optical mice and no mouse pads to still be able to use those ahead-of-time devices.

Turbo XT 12MHz, 8-bit VGA, Dual 360K drives
Intel 386 DX-33, Speedstar 24X, SB 1.5, 1x CD
Intel 486 DX2-66, CL5428 VLB, SBPro 2, 2x CD
Intel Pentium 90, Matrox Millenium 2, SB16, 4x CD
HP Z400, Xeon 3.46GHz, YMF-744, Voodoo3, RTX2080Ti

Reply 1 of 6, by wbahnassi

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And here is a better quality print with lamination. I tried printing on a glossy paper. The print was perfect and very clean, yet the mouse totally refused to operate on it. So I printed the pattern again on plain paper and laminated it. It works beautifuly.

Now.. who needs some optical mouse pads? 😋

Turbo XT 12MHz, 8-bit VGA, Dual 360K drives
Intel 386 DX-33, Speedstar 24X, SB 1.5, 1x CD
Intel 486 DX2-66, CL5428 VLB, SBPro 2, 2x CD
Intel Pentium 90, Matrox Millenium 2, SB16, 4x CD
HP Z400, Xeon 3.46GHz, YMF-744, Voodoo3, RTX2080Ti

Reply 2 of 6, by tannerstevo

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Thereis also this[img][attachment=0]mousepad.jpg/img]

Reply 3 of 6, by wbahnassi

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Wow, I assume the mouse for this pad has sensors both on the tip side and the end side, and the mouse has to span the two pattern regions to function correctly.

Turbo XT 12MHz, 8-bit VGA, Dual 360K drives
Intel 386 DX-33, Speedstar 24X, SB 1.5, 1x CD
Intel 486 DX2-66, CL5428 VLB, SBPro 2, 2x CD
Intel Pentium 90, Matrox Millenium 2, SB16, 4x CD
HP Z400, Xeon 3.46GHz, YMF-744, Voodoo3, RTX2080Ti

Reply 4 of 6, by momaka

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I must say, I'm quite amused by this early "optical" mouse technology. Never seen it in person. Looks like they just removed the ball from a ball mouse and directly put the X/Y IR LED sensors on the bottom of the mouse to get it to go up/down & left/right. I had a random thought about doing this one day to a ball mouse, but I guess these guys beat me to it, and by quite the period.
Still, it's an interesting piece of technology, these mice.
Nice work with the DIY mousepad. 😀

Side note: I can see this type of mouse in applications where one wants to limit the use of the computer by other people - simply remove the mousepad, and whoever wants to use the computer will have to do so only by keyboard. 🤣

Reply 5 of 6, by wbahnassi

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Amazing how old is this technology. And to appreciate it more, it had to work with the very little power it could get from a COM port, whereas the popular optical mice that came much later were on PS2, which already has 5V and allows somewhat higher amp draw to properly power a bright LED and the internal chip.

w.r.t the mouse pad, I'd really like to try a finer pattern, but a regular house inkjet printer doesn't seem to be able to go that fine. Do you think a laser printer can do a better job on a standard paper? The paper finish has to be matte unfortunately.

Turbo XT 12MHz, 8-bit VGA, Dual 360K drives
Intel 386 DX-33, Speedstar 24X, SB 1.5, 1x CD
Intel 486 DX2-66, CL5428 VLB, SBPro 2, 2x CD
Intel Pentium 90, Matrox Millenium 2, SB16, 4x CD
HP Z400, Xeon 3.46GHz, YMF-744, Voodoo3, RTX2080Ti

Reply 6 of 6, by rasz_pl

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wbahnassi wrote on 2024-09-29, 13:10:

Thanks to LGR and TechTangent's videos on the topic

Cathode Ray Dude also did a few videos on those
Who's responsible for the optical mouse? (it's not Xerox) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dIKZCQnplDA
Q500, The Weirdest Optical Mouse https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cd6lxwjX2Bk
LMOX2, The Other Weirdest Mouse https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2UXmDuiqMW0 <- this one uses that stupid two part pattern
Jack Hawley's Unstoppable Computer Mouse https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=POSPaiutNlQ not optical, but really weird 😀

https://github.com/raszpl/FIC-486-GAC-2-Cache-Module for AT&T Globalyst
https://github.com/raszpl/386RC-16 memory board
https://github.com/raszpl/440BX Reference Design adapted to Kicad
https://github.com/raszpl/Zenith_ZBIOS MFM-300 Monitor

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