I’ve been rocking the Kensington Orbit wired for years now and I’ve yet to find a better trackball.
Reasons:
- works for both hands
- scroll ring
- big ball
- wired
- works reliably
I use the trackball with my left hand and a mouse with my right.
It seems like such a cheaply made product, but it just works so very, very well.
I’m not sure how old this community is, but I just started seeing it today. I feel like it, and this post in particular, were made for me. I’ve never enjoyed anything but the Orbit.
Orbit with wrist rest is S tier. Orbit with no wrist wrest is trash tier
I mean, they ship with the detachable wrist rest in my experience, so regardless of how one feels about the wrist rest I think you’re good. Unless you meant a separate one, which is almost as achievable.
As of now, this community is about 4 hours old. Welcome aboard!
I’m grateful for its existence. Lemmy is the only place I’ve found anything but derision for trackballs.
big ball
I don’t think that the Orbit is this large, but about twenty years back, IIRC, Kensington had some trackball that had a ball that could be removed and had the same dimensions as standard-sized pool balls, so if you wanted to use pool balls, you could. There are all sorts of crazy pool ball designs out there.
kagis
Yeah, sounds like the Orbit uses a 40mm diameter ball. A standard American pool ball is apparently 2.25 inches (57.15 mm).
Sounds like the device in question was the: “the old mechanical Kensington Turbo Mouse Pro and Expert Mouse Pro”. This guy says that he had some trouble trying to use the balls on newer trackballs with optical sensors, as they don’t detect the ball well-enough:
https://www.trackballmouse.org/kensington-expert-wireless-8-ball-and-9-ball-trackball-prototypes/
But of course, I had to try and put the ball in my (more than 10 year) old and trusted USB Wired Expert as well. The ball fits perfectly (it’s the same size)… but the optical tracking didn’t really work, especially on the white / yellow 9-Ball, and the white parts of the 8-Ball. It results in stop and go movement of the mouse cursor.
Hmm.
The “stop and go” thing sounds familiar. One thing I suppose someone might do is to electrically-modify the trackball. I once had a trackball with a translucent pink ball that I used in a dark room. It had a red LED. This meant that the trackball would visibly glow, which was obnoxious. It also had USB power-saving, so the LED would go to a low-power state after a few seconds of non-movement, go to high-power state when you started moving the ball, which meant that it would visibly change brightness. I liked using the thing from a mechanical standpoint, but the glowing, flashing pink ball was very distracting.
CCD sensors can not just detect visible light, but also infrared, unless they have a filter on them to try to exclude it. Infrared light wouldn’t be distracting to my eyes, and if it was enough for the trackball sensor, that’d be great. I figured that it was worth a shot, see i I went out to mod the thing. Bought an infrared LED, got some solder wick, disassembled the trackball, desoldered the red LED, swapped in the infrared LED and powered the thing up. And it worked! No (visible) glowing or flashing. Sort of. Problem was that it worked fine when I was moving the ball, but when I had my hand off the thing for a while and started moving it, it didn’t reliably pick up on movement. My guess was that the sensor had a harder time picking up the ball surface when illuminated by infrared than the visible red light, and so when the trackball went into USB power-saving mode, had a dimmer light, and it was pretty marginal to be able to detect movement.
In my case, I went and dug up the datasheet for the chip used in the trackball, hoping that there was some nice, external input that’d let me disable power-saving — the trackball was attached to a desktop, so I was fine leaving it in high-power mode all the time. Sure enough, one pin on the chip indicated whether it was in low power mode or not. Soldered a wire to that pin and bam, thing worked fine even when just starting to roll the trackball.
But if they’re getting stop-and-go detection, might be the same sort of thing, that the pool ball isn’t as reflective or is more reflective. Like, it might be worth slapping a pool ball in and also getting a higher-luminosity (or lower-luminosity, if the issue is the image being blown out) LED. Might also try adding features to make it easier for the camera to see moving details — I guess that drawing on a pool ball would ruin the aesthetic, but maybe it’d be possible to use a permanent infrared marker.
I guess I’ll get an Expert, too, if only to find out whether it’s really the best. Thank you for that whole excursion, it answers many questions I had on my mind for a long time.
Thanks, but to correct one point in my above comment, I said that the balls were standard pool ball size. I’m pretty confident that I remember reading something two decades back about someone getting sent a whole set of balls by Kensington, and that they were pool ball size. Might have been on the e-zine TidBITS.
I’m getting some conflicting information — the page I linked to said that the Kensington Expert ball is 55mm. There’s a third-party replacement ball here on Amazon, which also says that it’s 55mm.
The page says that the standard pool ball mod “doesn’t always fit”:
The idea of the pool ball in the film is not new: trackball fans have used US pool balls, or billiard balls, of exactly the size 55mm (2.16″) to ‘mod’ their trackball device for years. US size pool balls have reportedly not always fit properly though, so you might need to do some modifications to the device for it to actually work. Good tracking results are not guaranteed, but it will look nice!
However, this page says that a standard pool ball is 57mm:
https://www.legacybilliards.com/blogs/resources/what-sizes-do-billiard-balls-come-in
Pool balls are used to play various pool games, such as eight-ball, nine-ball, and straight pool. The balls are numbered and colored
The regulation size and weight of the balls are as follows:
- diameter of 2 1⁄4 in (57 mm), plus or minus 0.005 in (0.127 mm)
It sounds like Kensington maybe sent the guy a special 55mm pool ball, and the text I’m remembering from 20 years back might have been someone making an error, just assuming that they were standard pool ball size (since they are pretty close), and then the article I linked to making the error of assuming that people were actually using standard size pool balls.
Just didn’t want to mislead anyone trying to do the mod who might wind up with a trackpad and a pool ball that doesn’t fit.
I had one for years, but eventually the buttons started mis-clicking. I replaced it with an
ElgooElecom Huge. So many buttons!Edit: fix manufacturer name.
Is this the one you meant? Looking up “Elgoo Huge” just returns 3d printers on DDG for me.
Yup, that’s the one. Elgoo is something else entirely.
As someone who has been a fan of the Orbit since I discovered it, I ordered one. I look forward to seeing whether the extra buttons help or hinder.
Man, I just want my old Microsoft trackball to work lol
I have the bigger brother, the Expert, as my main driver for the last 2 years. Brilliant trackball, ruined all other trackballs and mice for me. They might seem cheaply made, but it’s actually very durable. I’ve had it with me while traveling, just loose in my suitcase, never an issue. The only thing that broke over the years was the one I least suspected: the ball itself. Fell to the ground once and its shell just shattered. Was easily replaced by a cheap generic one though.
I wish it had four buttons. I use the back/forward buttons enough to justify the Expert Mouse, but the scroll wheel broke down and I eventually switched to an Adesso T50, then a HUGE.
I’m glad this thing works for you but my wrist hurts just looking at it. I’ll stick with my old redball Logitech.
My wrist was never an issue for me, I always had problems with my shoulder using a mouse. Switching to trackballs solved this completely.
Oh, yeah. Trackballs are the best.
I went with or orbit then 3 x expertmouse. Loved them but between coding and gaming they would wear out.
Current daily drivers is a CST laser trac (now xkeys.com) and a GameBall depending on how I am feeling. Love them both and can’t recommend strongly enough. Kind of comes down to hand size as to which will work better for you but my wrist is eternally thankful
Wow, I never found these before, they look really nice.
They are more “industrial” in their style but very repairable. Just completed a ~12 year change in their bearings and fell in love again.
