Firstly, where did you get those trackballs? I looked around, and all I could find in 2.125" were some steel ones from iowa. Ideally, I'd be able to get some excellent ceramic or hard polymer or something.
The epoxy resin trackball balls are from Belgium (Keith will hook you up, but only certain sizes are available). The 316 stainless steel and 52100 chrome steel trackball balls are from a guy on ebay (toolsupply). To work as a trackball ball their "grade" has to be 100 or lower (lower is better).
Secondly, what trackball are you modifying again? I'm trying to figure out exactly which of my trackballs I'd modify. I'm leaning towards an old kensington, as it has good ball bearings, but my best trackballs is probably a penny & giles, though it has no case or buttons, so it'd be more work to fabricate a case for it.
I'm modding my own and my Dad's Microsoft Trackball Opticals.
ON to the meat of my questions, I notice you posted about driving LED's from the teensy 3.0 PWM pin? I'm looking into doing that myself, and I wanted to know if you knew more about it than
I think a ULN2803 using the VUSB pin as it's 5V power should make the LEDs work with the teensy 3.0. Teensy PWM is 256hz 488.28hz, and I assume that should work just fine with a ULN2803. Can anyone think of a reason that it wont work before I order some ULN2803 ICs?
It's stupid that the teensy 3.0 is 3.3v, that's too low for a lot of things to interface without a logic level converter in-between. Or in the case of LEDs a transister IC like the ULN2803 because of the higher current needs.
A teensy pin will send current to open a gate on the ULN2803A darlington transistor IC to let the power sink from an LED (that has its own resistor). I believe I will be using 7 of the 8 gates, but only 1 of those 7 gates will be controlled by a PWM pin. Resistors are a much easier and more reliable method to control the brightness, you only need PWM if you need to vary the brightness. The ring around the trackball ball will get brighter when you move the cursor with the 2 LEDs attached to that PWM controlled gate.
Hmmm... I guess I could use 2 more resistors and the eighth gate instead of PWM... I'll decide later...
So you are driving the LED's from the PWM pin of the teensy. From what I know about transistors this makes sense. I am wanting to power an LED matrix I have with some form of brightness control, so I am wondering if a similar scheme would work. I need to know about the power requirements of the transistors. How do I calculate how much power they waste as heat? I want to do some accounting to ensure I don't go over my limit for a USB device. Would it be better to have a few transistors in parallel acting as one, or having each "group" of LED's driven by a transistor?
All you have to do is make sure that upon startup you are drawing less than 100ma. Then you negotiate for a 500ma load, and after approval you can turn everything on and use up to 500ma without a problem. You don't have to be anal about efficiency, half an amp is already a measly amount. But there's always spec sheets and your trusty fluke if you want to go that route.