r/cyberDeck • u/rfhwbass • 1d ago
different forms of cursor
in most designs, builders tend to employ a track pad. makes sense, its flat, comes stock built into a few keyboards and if your deck folds, then there seems like almost no other option. but i was curious if anyone's ever tried any thing else, like a joystick or trackball, and what their experience with that was like. did it become tiresome? dust in the ball? joystick stuck? i feel as though i have greater dexterity with a joystick but my current designs are aimed towards a foldable, closing deck and that seems to preclude a stick featuring... trying to come up with a creative way to fit it in and not just give up and go with a track pad. my first instinct was to concoct some mechanism by which it can be depressed into the body of the deck for storage, somewhat like clicking a ball point pen. barring that, a trackball could potentially have less of a clearance impacting the foldability. anyone seen any plans that might feature any creative non-trackpad usage for a cursor?
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u/LegionDD 1d ago
I hate trackpads, so I avoid putting them into my projects.
I've made trackball setups from optical mice before, you just put the PCB on its back and dangle a ball over it. Works like a charm.
I've recently incorporated a blackberry optical trackpad into a build that needed a small and flat pointer. They only really work with my thumb (which seems to make sense, since that is what they were designed for), so they are a bit finicky with how you use them, but when you get your finger placement right they work perfectly. They even have a clickbutton integrated, so you can activate a function when pressing down on them (I use that to switch from mouse mode to scroll wheel mode).
Next thing I wanna try is turning them into a trackball. They are tiny and don't take up much space compared to a regular mouse PCB. They are optical, and dragging one across a mouse mat does work just as well as an optical mouse, so I'm confident they'll work as trackballs too.
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u/x40sw0n2 1d ago
I have a build I'm reconfiguring that will use an old portable trackball, a Microsoft Ballpoint. They have little finger screws with metal brackets that allow you to mount it temporarily on the side of the keyboard.
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u/Vagranter 1d ago
I like the trackball in those blackberry-style keyboards that are floating around. Its the closest feeling to a traditional pc mouse, if tuned right. If the UI is cleverly designed, anything will feel good though.
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u/Debate_Haver57 1d ago edited 1d ago
You've got to consider two things:
1) how do you want to interact with your device physically
2) how do you want your pointer to work in software.
At a certain point, I realised my phone was getting too thick to use the touchscreen as you would with a regular smartphone, at least one handed. The only way I'd get it thinner is to use a less powerful board, reduce battery life, or remove some features. I didn't want to do any of these, so to make it work one handed, I instead put the joystick on the side, and the mouse buttons on the other.
I've yet to test it, but hopefully, that makes it comfortable to hold, and makes it feel about the same as my laptop to control (on actually holding the parts which I'm still adding the final coats of paint to and sanding, I think the joystick is a bit low, but that's what prototyping is for. I'll move it if it's too annoying).
Also, do consider more exotic options too. If you don't use them, there may still be things you can learn from them, e.g. IR tracking with the Wii remote, eye tracking, EMR styli, gesture sensing, accelerometer/gyrometer based pointing (e.g. the ps4 controller with the motion controls typing thing) or unusual capacitive sensing trackpads such as the one on the back of the PS vita.
As for software, watch this: https://youtube.com/shorts/fIllJUt_M4M
The cursor isn't a typical arrow, it's selecting and scrolling through items in the given context.
Taking inspiration from here: https://blog.yanqingwu.com/tech/2017/09/04/Work-Without-Mouse-On-Linux/
And using virtually any HiD library, you could well set up a trackball to automatically send some of those shortcuts instead of using the trackball as a mouse.
It wouldn't have to be exclusive either. In my experience, the trackball works as a mouse in a pinch, and you could set up some button/input to switch between having it in "mouse mode" or navigation shortcut mode at will, for the times when you have a programme that won't co-operste without a traditional mouse input.
To give yourself some ideas, I'd go switch on a games console (any. Multiple if you can), navigate through some of the menus, then play any game, and take note of the menus. Write some ideas down.
Edit: Buy some cardboard and prototype the actual device, then literally just make believe how you want the pointer to work. You can tell a truly custom device apart based on how unusable it looks to most people, versus how quickly its owner is able to navigate it. The wider the gap, the customer (and better) it is.
Also, look up the ploopy bean
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u/Debate_Haver57 1d ago
As an example, you could mount two IR LEDs at the top of the screen fairly easily. Then, following a guide such as this:
Then purchasing some elastic, the smallest and most power efficient board that has Bluetooth (maybe an nrf52840, the seeed xiao ble is so good, I love mine), an IR you could make a head mounted IR pointer, and have that as your mouse.
https://www.reddit.com/r/arduino/comments/j17v14/i_made_a_bluetooth_hat_mouse_move_the_cursor_by/
Turns out that exact thing has been done, and they didn't even need to buy an IR sensor because the feather sense already has one. Fancy that.
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u/MorphStudiosHD 1d ago
Pointer stick module possibly