Blue and White G3 "Optical" Puck Mouse
7th Jan 2006, 11:18:01 PM
It's Saturday night and I'm trying to find things to do other than study for my CCNA cert, so I'm reading AppleFritter. Since I have a spare 5V blue LED, a light up mouse seems like something I simply must have right away. The soldering iron is heating up...
My victim is the deeply unpopular Puck mouse belonging to my B&W Power Mac G3. This is the oldest model that lacked the dimple on the button to tell the user that they are holding the mouse the right way up.
The procedure takes just a few minutes; open up the mouse and just solder an LED to the 1st and 4th solder pads on the PCB just below the ball:
Taking the advice of the AppleFritter page, I mounted my LED so that it shone on the mouse ball. Since the LED was a superbright, I also partly covered it with some insulation tape so that it would not dazzle me all the time!
In daylight, the effect is subtle:
In a dark room, it illuminates the desk nicely:
