Came up with the fey idea today of augmenting a trackball so as to provide a force feedback or even enable a joystick-like operation. Initial idea was to use magnets inside of the ball and carefully counterweight it, but after some thought I deemed that infeasible due to the needed EMF to provide the expected countertorque one would experiance from a joystick.
New idea is to hack the old ball mouse technology with the rubberized ball and two rollers. Escatic with the idea, I began looking around for a suitable mouse to hack, and instead found this little gem:
The internal circuitry is magnificently simple in nature, in fact there's just one chip soldered onto the board with 2 or 3 resistors!
My plan is to get some servos or motors and shove them in so that they'll be able to drive the large, friendly rollers (which have ball bearings, btw) and then look into getting something like an ATTiny and a motor driver chip to get them up and rolling.
No idea what the time table is on this thing, but I'm excited none-the-less.
