Technical Descriptions

By: Mohammad Hossain

ENGL 21007- Section A

3/27/2023

Computer Mouse

Outline

The computer mouse is a very common item in our society, today it seems like such a necessary item when it comes to using a computer. However, the modern mouse didn’t appear until much later and instead people had to use the arrow keys at first to move the pointer around. Along with this there were also other iterations of the mouse that served the same purpose but were much less capable.

Introduction

The first ever mouse to be produced was the Track Ball, it was made in 1946 but wasn’t available to the public at that time. It was first produced by the British navy and was made with the purpose of helping tacking airplanes using radars. It was later adopted by the Canadian navy for the same purpose and was called the DATAR trackball. It was made in 1958 and used a bowling ball as the movement mechanism. The first mouse that was available to the public was the Prototype Engelbart mouse which was made in 1963 by Doug Engelbart.

It had a wooden cover and had 3 main features. The first two features were two gear like parts under the mouse that were placed vertically and horizontally. It allowed the mouse to move up and down but only one direction at a time. The other feature was a button on the mouse that allowed the user to click on links from their mouse instead of their keyboard. Then a company named Xerox and Apple decided to work together to incorporate the much freer flowing ball and axis mouse to the public with the Macintosh computer.

The Mouse remain consistent with its ball and axis design, and nothing really changed besides the appearance of the case until 1985. The Mouse wheel was then introduced and added in at the side of the case, next to the user’s thumb. Then the position of the wheel moved to be in between the two mouse buttons for more convenience. This is a demonstration of how the mouse evolved the speed of interaction between user and computer. Another option that was available but much mess popular was the optical mouse, it avoided the problem that roller mouses had, which was the fact that over time dirt would gunk up the ball and destroy the mouse, but limited movement of the mouse as it needed to be on top of specific material to work.

Then another great leap was made in 1999 when optical mice were available for much cheaper for the public to purchase, it was much more precise than a ball mouse and lasted much longer. From here the mouse kept improving in many ways. It has got buttons placed on the side for quicker access, processors that are able to keep up and give more accurate responses and more.

Technical Description of The Mouse

The mouse that I want to discuss is one I don’t currently own so I will have to use one from the internet. My Current Model is the Logitech M705, and I can fully disassemble that mouse without damaging the mouse itself. That is why I will be using the M235 for my report. The M235 is a simp wireless mouse that can be broken down into four major parts. The First part is the upper shell, it consists of the part of the mouse that’s lets you click on links and other applications.

The Second layer is the lower shell of the computer, this consists of the bottom half of the mouse that serves some extra features besides holding the mouse together. The third section of the mouse is the wireless chip that you insert into the computer that allows it without needing a wire. The last component is the most complicated one, it is the main motherboard, and it consists of all the little parts that make the computer mouse function. Without it the mouse would not even be able to function.

Upper Case Section

The First case consists of a hard plastic that holds the mouse together. It is accompanied by a softer and much more flexible layer of plastic that can bend. It is designed to interact with the mouse button so that the user has a larger surface area to click on instead of a tiny button on the mouse. The final Piece attached to the case is the mouse wheel, this allows users to scroll up and down web pages with ease. The mouse wheel on this specific model is a optical. There are two types of scroll wheel, one is magnetic and the other is an optical one. The magnetic one has a small magnet at the center of the wheel, attached to the side of that magnet is a small chip that has two magnet sensors. These are called Hall Effect Sensors, and these basically read the movement and strength of the magnet to tell if and by how much the mouse wheel moved. This chip has a small metallic piece called a semiconductor and it has electrons, and these electrons are influenced by the magnet. Moving the magnet will result in the electrons also moving in certain directions which would let the computer know when the wheel is moved. There are two sensors, because having just one won’t tell the computer which direction the mouse wheel is moving. One is placed horizontally while the other one is placed vertically. Both sensors work together to measure the movement, direction and speed of the wheel to give a propriate response. The Optical wheel works using lights. The source of light comes from an infrared LED and has a small lens to focus all the light. This is placed on one side of the mouse and on the other side there is an optical sensor that tracks the light. Then within the wheel itself there are rows of lines that break up the light the lights from the lead. This shape is similar to a bicycle wheel, and you move the wheel the little beams temporarily block the light from going to the sensor which the mouse reads as pulse waves. The mouse then breaks this information down to angles and number of pulses per 1,000^th second to determine the response. This only covers the speed at which the wheel moves however and to determine direction the sensor on the reviving end is cut into two precises. When the wheel moves the pillars start to block light from a certain direction, from this the mouse can tell which direction the wheel is moving.

Lower Case Section

The second case holds the whole mouse together, but it also holds both the battery and the dongle that connects your mouse and your PC. It also consists of a hard shell as shown in the bottom, as well as a slider that can be opened to replace the battery. Along with this there is also a sensor that is used to track movement, but this will be covered later.

Dongle

A small wireless plug in that has a chip built into it. It uses a unique frequency that is designed to only interact with your mouse. It was made this way so that it doesn’t interact with other devices that it shouldn’t. This information produced by the mouse is turned into radio frequency that is sent out to the dongle. The dongle receives the information and breaks it down to binary for the computer to read. Then the computer uses that information to move the pointer around.

Motherboard

Contains the Mouse button, PCB and the Optical navigation image sensor. First is the Mouse button, it is not as complex as the other pieces of the mouse but still serves a very important role. It allows you to open links and files when you press down on the little button, this information is then sent to your mother board and eventually to your computer. This information is transferred through the mouse through the PCB (the printed circuit board). A PCB is a flat board that has no extra components like microchips, resistors, capacitors and connectors. It becomes a motherboard after all these components are added to it. A PCB has copper wires built into it that goes to and connect components together. These wires work as a bridge and allow the different parts to communicate with each other. These copper wires share information using electricity which leads the rest of the PCB to be made of nonconductive material like woven fiber glass. The brain of the mother board is the SoC (The System on a Chip) and it overlooks the entire system. Everything is connected to the SoC and goes through it before a decision is made on how the information provided will be used. The final component to the mouse is the IAS (Image Acquisition System), this is how the mouse responds to movement and accurately displays that information as the pointer. This consists of the led, lens and the image pixel array. The lead shines a light through the lens and the lens curves the light into an angle. This highlights small bumps within a mat, or a table and the highlighted bumps create a certain pattern. The light then bounces back up into the image pixel array. This array takes around 17,000 pictures every second to constantly monitor movement. The mouse doesn’t save these images but instead compares them constantly to see if the surface has shifted. It can do this because it takes thousands of picture every second and can therefore accurately tell when the mouse had moved, even if the movement was very slight.

Conclusion

The Invention of the mouse is an interesting journey, but its existence is not that surprising. Throughout the early 1900’s the developmental growth of the computer was very rapid and in just a few short years many drastic improvements were made in the tech field. The slow movement that the pointer from a keyboard provides wasn’t going to cut it in this growing field of technology and was bound to be replaced. Mouses have also evolved from their early stages of single directional movement to wireless and multi directional movement systems. This magnificent device will be around for a long period of time, but I believe that even it will eventually become outdated in the far future.

The leap from moving the pointer with your keyboard to being able to input multiple command with your mouse demonstrates how fast technology moves and at some point, I believe that even a person’s hand will eventually not be fast enough to keep up with the speed of information flow available in the future. As the world of computers becomes faster and much more compact so does the world of mouses. There might be a time in the future when the mouse becomes obsolete and brain implants send electrical signals to computers. Though I don’t know when that will happen, or even if that will happen, I know that the modern mouse will keep growing. With this I believe that the mouse is far from its final form and will continue to improve and stay with us for a long time.

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