Alright, I thought I'd start a new thread for this since it doesn't really belong with the sidewinder.  This one took me only about a days worth of work to get to a working point, where the sidewinder took me several weeks to figure everything out and find the software that would reverse the axis and everything.  Also the buttons were much better positioned than the sidewinder where I could desolder and remove them much easier than the sidewinder.

This is the pcb that it started with.  It's much longer and narrower than the sidewinder:  
That's how it started out with everything in place, and all the wires removed.



Got everything desoldered here:




Everything finally resoldered back in place:



Here I started to make the arms for the ball to do a test, I messed up and got front back confused so left and right was wrong here, so I ultimately had to remove and reposition them.  :



This was just before I plugged it in for the first time and tried to test it.  I initially wanted to use this kensington turboball ball, but despite my earlier tests after plugging it in, the sensor failed to register the ball.  I assume because the ball is translucent.  This is when I still had the arm mountings for the ball reversed.




I then switched to a microsoft trackball explorer ball.  But again this sensor seemed rather picky, and there were slight dead spots in the movement of the cursor.  I tried to reposition the ball a number of times, but nothing seemed to help.  I'm guessing the sensor didn't like the translucent nature of the tbe ball either.


Finally I went back to a logitech wireless trackman ball which is what I used in the sidewinder hack.  The sensor seemed to really like this ball, and with it it has a realy smooth and detailed action.  

  So after that it's completely working although still borgified ass ugly looking.  I'm forced to leave everything sort of in this position.   I think it's much cleaner still than the sidewinder hack, and ultimately it would be much more positionable because the dpi switches are with the left and right mouse buttons instead of being on the back which was difficult to use and to design around.  










The action and detail in practice is probably about 10-20% smoother I would say than the sidewinder hack at least.  Probably due to the extra 2000 dpi.

I would say the lachesis is a much better fit for a gaming trackball than the sidewinder at least for the electronics.    I also like the onboard memory and profile switching much more than the sidewinder.  For the bad parts,  I think the sensor is much more sensitive to what it will respond to, and I really had to get the ball to a close tolerance to the sensor in order for the action to be 100% smooth.   Another negative is that the sensor is placed at the rear of a large pcb, so  you need to have a large part sticking out in front of the ball which will make it look fairly awkward unless you come up with some sort of covering for it that will make it look ok.

The only functional part left to do is to come up with some sort of cap system for the secondary keys.  Currently they're just raw switches and not very useful.  They may also need to be repositioned.

All in all I think it's going to be hard, although somewhat more possible to make it look better than the sidewinder.  I think it's pretty cool either way since it's probably the first 4000dpi trackball in existence.

Just like the other one, it looks like an organically grown trackball.

It doesn't look like much though, maybe you need to find a better material for making a new shell.

Yeah I'm using loctite epoxy putty right now.  It's great stuff for making stuff like this which is strong and has to stand up to abuse and pressures.  It also cures in 5 minutes, so I don't have to wait long on long spans for it to set up.  I can't think of another material that would meet all the requirements to do the structure.   I also don't want to wait like 24 hours like with other epoxy putties to fully cure, where you might be able to sculpt the material, but you sacrifice that that for time and strength.  Loctite epoxy putty is extremely hard and strong.  The problem then is that it's difficult also to work after it's cured.  So it's a major pain in the butt to make it look decent instead of just globs of marshmallow.

   I think the only other way to actually do this would be to design it in a 3d cad and farm the work out to a 3d printer, which would make a good production prototype and look super cool, but take tons of time and money.  This is about $6 in epoxy putty and about an hour of work or so to hack the mouse apart and create the structure.


  Ultimately this is more to show anyone how to easily make a functionally high end trackball, if not high end looking, that simply don't exist in the marketplace, that they can use to pwn in games like warrock with where joysticks don't work for things like planes and choppers, and mice are impossible to use.
  That's where I primarily use this now and used the sidewinder for close to a year now to dominate the skies.

It's also pretty cool though I think that you can turn pretty much any mouse you want into a trackball with this method.  I wanted to do this for a long time just with normal mice because I use trackballs for normal desktop use, and didn't have enough trackball explorers for all the computers I use.  This is essentially a tutorial in how to make a trackball explorer, from a mouse, if you read it right.

 Functionally this hack makes a trackball explorer with dpi switching, and macro capability, for about $70 in materials not counting the ball which you might be able to find on ebay pr even logitech cheap.    Logitech does sell replacement balls. You might also use something like a cue ball.  The current average price of tbe's is way over $150.

I don't think they could sue you for modifying and repackaging something but the warranty would be gone also...I don't think they would care much considering that.

Protoss trackball?

With my trackball, the ball color doesn't matter at all. The little mechanical rollers it moves don't  care the least.

Very Borgish, I like it.

I started using this trackball because I had a triple-head Xinerama setup in X-Windows going and I didn't want to have to pick up my hand or the mouse repeatedly to cross 3840 pixels going from one extreme to the other.

You could use a key short cut instead, it's quicker.