LMOX2, The Other Weirdest Mouse
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- Опубліковано 7 жов 2021
- When I made my video about the Q500 mouse, I thought it was basically the only one of its type in the world - until I saw the one LGR had. And then he sent me a picture of the inside, and suddenly the Q500 looked unique again. And then he sent me the one he had, and I opened it up, and... well, maybe my mouse isn't so unique after all. Here's my best shot at a technical analysis of the LMOX2, and also a few corrections.
My Q500 video:
• Q500, The Weirdest Opt...
@LGR's LMOX2 video:
• This Serial "Optical L...
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Hey, I'm the guy that sent that to Clint! Can't believe I got so much content out that silly mouse. Great video as always!
Hahaha, wow, yeah, what a trip it's had! Now we have a chain of custody going back three steps - where'd *you* get it? Nobody else seems to have ever seen one of these, did it pop up at a flea market or something? Thanks for enjoying!
@@CathodeRayDude I found at the Goodwill in Lebanon, IN still in the shrinkwrap.
... and the trail goes cold.
OK, Goodwill donator. Where you at?? :-D
@@aaronedwards1239 I was there last week. Now this makes me wanna go check the ones down here in the evansville area.
@@CathodeRayDude I think it's rad that you guys are networking with each other. I would love a collab sometime.
Seems like they had found two imperfect ways to create an optical mouse and decided to make them fight in a battle Royale fight to know which one consumers will prefer and then got destroyed by the actual optical sensor that arrived not to long after.
In 1996 upto 2002 mostly everyone prefered the microsoft mouse and then the microsoft optical mouse. Those shipped with every business computer.
I wonder if the neoprene shade is to block *sunlight*, which has lots of infrared. They might've seen issues with users working in sunny environments.
I remember when LGR did a video about the Sexy Mouse, and it said on the box to avoid using it in direct sunlight. He tried using it outside and it didn't work, so you're most likely correct.
Or inside the aforementioned arc furnace. Been near one once. Pretty sure they emit everything from DC ground currents to ultraviolet.
Could the neoprene be loaded with some graphite particles and offer some EMC immunity maybe?
Yeah, a lot of computer equipment is strangely sensitive to UV if they're not properly shielded. I've heard of electronics being recalled because they would completely break under UV, because their engineers didn't think to test for it before going to production. I also vaguely remember a story about a solar flare causing a bizarre glitch in a video game or computer because of UV.
@@starcrashr the Raspi 3 (?) release version reboots when you take a flash photo of it because one of the chips is sensitive to light (and improperly packaged). Not a big deal if you know about it - just put something opaque over it - but a surprise to some early adopters
All this technology, yet they didn't figure out strain relief.
GOD, RIGHT
RIGHT
putting the LMOX2 back together sucks every time. the cable is just kind of IN THERE, WHEREVER, and the side button has no retention slot. infuriating! unnecessary!
With the powers of LGR and Cathode Ray Dude combined, we can...uh...look at weird old mice! YAY!
I love that "two of them" comes up so much LOL
It's interesting that a button (or buttons) on the side of mice existed as far back as '96. In my mind I figured that didn't happen until the mid 2000s.
Mousing over a full desk in '96?! Nice!
After watching this, I think you might actually have things backwards on which of these came first. You're absolutely right that the Q500 is a minimum viable product, but I think that might be a product of simplifying what they learned from the other one. As you said, the neoprene insert on the mouse did effectively nothing, and it's a much more complex device. It may have been that they realized a cheaper way to do things that still sorta works and tried to simplify as a way to cut costs.
possibly, but I really feel like the separate-X-and-Y pad is such a ridiculous instrument that I can't picture someone going from the grid to the XY design
@@CathodeRayDude absolutely valid point, though I tend to never underestimate cost cutting measures in electronics 😅
Could just be that the manufacturer realized there were trade-offs to each approach and offered a portfolio of options to the OEM to implement as they saw fit.
@@CathodeRayDude Although, as you saw, the separate X and Y pad could take odd angles slightly better than the grid design. Tech rarely goes from simpler to more complicated to achieve the same effect.
I'm gonna throw another 2 cents at it, to say that maybe they did release a tad later the cheaper model, maybe even keeping both on market, one as a more "premium" product, while the other is a low cost variant.
What about patent TW388829B, "Optical mouse and mouse pad" by Kyoung-Jin Kim? The original is in Chinese, but it seems to match the Q500.
KILLER WORK! That's DEFINITELY it. I tried and tried but could not find this. Now I gotta read it and see if I can suss out how it works
@@CathodeRayDude You might want to check out the Korean patents it links to, I found the machine translation a bit better; of course the ideal would be Korean speaker.
Thank you so much for putting up this video tonight. I've been having the absolute worst week with my mental health and you don't know how much it helps when someone makes a video in this style that you've mastered. Just allows me to switch off all of my anxiety and dread for that 17 minutes.
I'm so glad to hear that, gosh -_- Good luck with Everything.
Oh I can relate! Maybe not quite as bad for me, but there's certainly a special kind of warm feeling in certain creators' videos :)
Hey man, hope you feel better and have a better week coming up.
It's been a LONG time (like 20 years) since I did my research into weird mice, but I remember Iotek was a Chinese company that designed a bunch of budget oddball pointing devices. They have a few CN parents in their name.
One day I'll find the weird ultrasonic 3d ring mouse I bought, due to the culmination of that research.
*patents These guys, iirc, are both based on the same patent. They use IR light to reflect patterns onto receivers, which are designated to X and Y tracking. You're right in that the controller works similarly to how a ball mouse works, btw. It's not the exact same, but similar enough to mention it.
I forget how it knows which direction it's moving, but I know it was in the patent.
Here's one of their patents that I was able to find.
CN99800299A
Qijia Communication Kunshan Co Ltd ?
Going by the close ups, it seems like the 4 strands going to each photodiode are in 4x1 strips and not 2x2 bundles. This would make more sense for how it would work going across the grid, and it means the photodiodes and logic in the LMOX2 are working exactly the same as the Q500, sans the strobing lights.
If you break it down to one row of 4 _horizontal_ strands for the vertical movement, because it's exactly twice as wide as the dots, if it's over the dots it'll always have 2 strands seeing black and two seeing white.
So then the possibilities for what each strand can "see" are:
ooxx
xoox
xxoo
oxxo
This means the horizontal position doesn't matter. No matter where the mouse is, as long as it's aligned properly it'll always only be seeing 4 white, or 2:2 white & black. The result is the two photodiodes will be seeing the same pattern of dark and light differences when you move the mouse vertically.
This also explains why the alignment is so sensitive compared to the Q500. A small amount of rotation will cause that ratio to change. If the row of stands gets too far off you'll cease to get the same clear dark and light differences between the rows, and thus to the diodes, and it'll have a harder time understanding what is happening.
Now we just need Ken Shirriff to decap the chips and figure out how they really work
Just finished up watching LGR's video about his new weather station hobby :) Such a nice surprise to see you two collaborating on this. Fantastic content as always here - I love watching your stuff :)
its possible that the lightshielding is against sunlight, wich compared to artificial light is VERY intense and full of infrared and other spectrums
I'm a South Korean guy and I used the mouse when I was young.
And you can find red Hangul(Korean letter) with a rectangle on the box.
신개념 : new concept
광학식 : optical type
마우스 : mouse
So I can guess that the company was in South Korea.
“You could make it as big as you want, like an 8.5x11 sh-“
Kind of threw me off. I was expecting him to say A4, then remembered he was American.
@@Roxor128 You're not alone. I'm American and I call it A4.
(Well actually letter is 8.5x11, A4 is 8.25x11.75, buuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuut I'm pretty sure when I had a printer I used A4 anyway)
I was hoping for a followup on this and with out fail you and Clint came through!!! Cheers
It's crazy how, being born at the end of the 90s, I remember using ball mouses and all other classic techs before they completely disappeared. These videos are kinda nostalgic to me. My siblings have no idea how it was to see movie rental stores go from VCR to DVD, to Blu-ray, then out of business.... Great content as always.
Yeah, weird to think that some people never had the joy of opening a ball mouse at school, and then picking out the gunk that inevitably collects on the little rollers.
I don't miss ball mice at all. But i do have one or two stashed far far away as a way to remember the old times
I think everyone remembers ball mouse, but because the mental trauma caused, most people have chosen block the memory of them out 😊😊
@@dh2032 : It's been ~20 years since the switch to optical got going, there are UA-camrs that have seriously never used a ball mouse.
@@mfbfreak Picking other people's hair and skin gunk out of those mice are why I instantly embraced optical mice as soon as they became widely available.
@@mfbfreak I actually had this ball mouse from GE. Thing had like four or five buttons on it so it was perfect for gaming back then before that was even popular, I remember playing Jedi Knight, Jedi Outcast with that ball mouse.
Your recent videos are seriously just... all amazing? Like, I love all of them, but this was great. Glad Clint was a standup guy. I really love seeing the camaraderie amongst tech youtubers :)
Try to print a mousepad with gradually larger or smaller gaps. So you could theoretically have a hidpi area of the 'desk' our mousepad and a low one
probably wouldn't work too well, since the fiber optic light changes seem to depend on the grid spacing.
If you want to use this mouse, you can create a mouse pad with a slight Arc in the radius of your forearm so that as you move the mouse left and right and it rotates slightly it accounts for that to make it easier to use.
oh my god yeah i guess that would work. it would be easier to do with the Q500 though! with this, the grid would have to distort in a weird fashion
clint is such a babe. I asked him if i could sample some audio and he sent me the raw
Clint is really one of tech GOAT. Also glad I've stumbled on your content CRD great technical breakdowns.
I swear back in the 90s I had a different kind of optical mouse that required its own special pad. As I recall the pad was dark grey with very fine reflective lines (wires perhaps) in a grid.
Yep, that would have been a Mouse Systems design! Check out the Q500 video for an explanation of the WACKY system it used.
around half-way through the video I was like "hey, you could probably turn an entire desk into a mousepad since it works using square dots"
I was not expecting to see that become a reality by the end of the video.
amazing content as always 👍
I think you are spot on about how these worked. I think the ‘forgetting how to mouse’ is just an AGC (automatic gain control) circuit adapting. And all of them plus the mouse systems do work like a ball mouse just the the quadrature signal ‘unrolled’ as you said. The mouse systems is much older, it was around in the 80s. Those pads were a hassle though. Heavy and expensive to replace.
I recently came across your channel, and the content is not only well produced, but also fascinating! It's pretty interesting learning about video and the like, as well as pioneering yet failed oddities like this mouse. Thank you for being a brilliant content creator.
I guess the reason why they couldn't track X&Y on the Q500 is because the sensors don't just see 'Oh its on top' - 'Now its at the bottom' (Like in your animation) - I think that they really depend on the top two rows - middle two rows - bottom two rows (if not even more intermittent steps). Great vid as usual!
Love that you tech peeps watch each others videos, and add on to them more information and stuff.
Those “light seals” might just be to make it sound more solid. I have done that on a mouse i liked but hated the hollow clicky sound on. Worked perfectly.
I think IO-Tek probably made the Q500 as a reference design and the LMOX company probably licensed the chip and tweaked the design to work on a better mousepad.
IO-Tek probably showed off the chip a year earlier and both companies had started development around the same time to reach a 96 release date.
I really doubt it; the incorporation address of the company in the LMOX FCC application is in the same building as iotek's address in Seoul, so the importer didn't even do certification. They probably just asked iotek to white-label the mouse.
solid video! the mouse pad desk gag and the chaos window at the end were perfect!
You're channel is awesome man! Always looking forward to new videos.
Can't get enough of your videos! Keep up the great work.
Great video as always. Really like the in-depth analysis of old technology! :D
Pretty sure i saw a bunch of those LMOX2s in the UK, or a very similar product.... I was working for a very dodgy computer reseller, who bought computers from companies that had gone bust, we refurbished them, and then they were sold in his shop. Now i know why we never got any of them to work. The mouse pads had been lost between their original office and us.
9:58 I think you have the directions of the sensors switched.
If I had to guess at how it works then I'd say that they're basically sampling a whole slit of 4 fiber strands and then use the exact same technique as in the other mouse just with half the signal strength as only 2 out of the 4 strands will pass over the black squares in any direction.
Edit: If it were to work in the direction you suggested then it would be possible for the 2 strand wide sensor to pass in between the dots.
one funny artifact of the mouse wars was trackballs with optical sensing. it's an optical ball!
Amazing amount of effort in this, great video.
Very happy to see that LGR shipped that mouse over to you so you could make this vid
You have a very pleasant voice and intonation. Also a keen eye for interesting topics.
I love your style of production your channel is great !
Thanks, I really needed this today.
The way you make these videos is like, fantastic I cannot applaud you enough for the effort you put into this stuff. I'm a pretty avid collector of old electronics so anything bizarre or weird that I can't find any info on either in a thrift store or on Ebay I'll be sure to send your way to see if it fits into these narratives you weave together in your videos
My dad actually had one of these. Never understood how it worked exactly, until now 👍🏼
really glad i found your channel. you make really enjoyable content
All three of you guys rock! Love seeing such great collaboration in the community!
Hope everyone continues to be so great to each other. We all benefit from such collaboration. There are so many awesome and kind people in the retro tech community!
I love watching Adrian’s digital basement, RMC, LGR, Cathode Ray, This does not compute, Mac 84, Action Retro, 8bit Guy, and many others working together to provide us viewers with such amazing things to watch!
Love you guys! You rock!
A ball mouse is also moving an x grid and an y grid along optical sensors, I think especially the version with the x and y pad is indeed just analog ball mouse tech remapped to a surface.
I love your videos! I predict in the future you will have at least a million subscribers. Keep doing what you are doing.
Damn, that was a smooth cut with the two of them joke. I was half right with my comment on the Q500!
Also, I can confirm that the jitteriness is likely an issue with the poling rate of the serial interface. I've noticed the exact same thing happen with both Microsoft mice and a Genius WhiteMouse.
Nice deskmat, too.
That’s really clever to use optical fibers to do the integration math to sample a larger area. Neat. I also bet that the one with more fibers was substantially more expensive to produce, being the high end of io tech’s offerings, and the other, as you say, the minimum viable product. And with that many fibers I would expect that more than anything, assembly would have been a much higher amount of labor. Gut feelings here.
The mouse having seizure at the end is great LOL, great content!
Almost makes it look like something is queuing inputs, but I'm not familiar enough with serial mouse input to say if it's the OS or the mouse's chip...
@@TimeLemur6 I think what happened is he used two video clips, one with him talking, and another with him moving the mouse around, and used editing software to mask out the laptop screen
I love your videos. Thank you!
I love your channel since I found it, and fangirl in me here; but You look amazing too!
Having used one of these in the 1990s I can add that you're absolutely correct with the release dates. The first "optical" mice that were not using optical flow type sensors (like the Microsoft one) used metal printed bases as well. I believe from memory, but cannot confirm that I may have used a Sun Microsystems mouse that used a metal pad with blue lines on it.
Actually I found it... It's on the Wikipedia page. It was indeed a three button mouse from Sun.
I'm here for Mouse Discourse.
Your comment on rotating angles of mouse use reminded me of something. I used to have a Wacom tablet that included a mouse that could be used on the tablet. The tablet had a habit of slowly rotating on my desk as I used it, rotating the mouse tracking with it. Usually I would notice it and rotate it back before it got too annoying. One day I looked down and realized that the tablet had gradually rotated 90°, which meant that up and down were transposed with left and right. What’s crazy is that my brain had gradually compensated for it, and I didn’t even realize it had happened. Once I became conscious of it, the ruse collapsed and I had to rotate the tablet back to regain control.
TWO OF THEM.
Also I know that it seems like the sampling rate of those mice is fast but I'm pretty sure that if you move them fast enough that you're literally just skipping over sections of the mouse pad
The few seconds it takes to mouse again is likely just the time it takes for the auto-gain to find the middle of the signal, using the mousepad pattern as a preamble.
Great video as always! I don't have anything smart to add but I'm still commenting to boost that engagement stat for you
I've never heard the phrase "very beige" before, but holy shitballs that is one beige mousepad!
Ah yes, the mouse desk pad… 1996 style
I feel it's a bit of the other way round: Perhaps the Q500 was a cost-reduced version of the LMOX2?
Great video!
I love the moiré patterns the mouse pad makes.
Some guy in the waiting room at the doctor's office was watching one of your videos as I walked by.
Kind of a cool moment.
Didn't say anything because you know, doctor's office.
Hi dude from waiting room if you read this. This is guy with swollen face.
Try one of those passive Serial to PS/2 adaptors. The chip inside might support both protocols.
...wow, that's not a bad idea at all.
The photo of the two kitties got my Like!
this compaq armada e500 laptop was one of my first pcs ever, seeing it again brought back so many childhood memories!
This is the greatest crossover episode of all time.
love the mouse desk
The mouse desk was absolutely hilarious XD
I dunno if I'm making things up in my memories but I have a vague recollection of going to somewhere that did mapping or architectural CAD work as a kid (would have been early 2000's) and seeing these guys using a whole table with the grid dots on them. Perhaps this was a potential use case in industrial process that got ported over to the consumer side?
The dots might have been for scale and nothing to do with the mouse - interesting none the less.
Those would have been CAD tablets, which i THINK actually use a completely different system where the pad has a grid of wires embedded in it and the puck finds its location by inducing current in them - the grid you can see is just for reference. But I may be completely wrong about that, I haven't deep dived it yet.
A cluster of four fibres into one photosensor can be interpreted not just as white or black, but also as three intermediate shades of grey. Surely that's why a company would choose to make such a device in addition to the "budget" Q500 design.
3:26 I appreciate this
I fuckin love that picture
@@Prezzen77 It’s just the two of them, they’ll make it if they try!
i hope you never stop using the "two of them" meme, it always cracks me up
The middle mouse button functions are as far as I remember are a duplicate of a Logic 3 serial ball mouse I owned around the same time (possibly a year or two earlier). As far as I can tell/remember similar features were quite common for 3 button mice around the time as very little software actually supported 3 button mice (certainly windows 3.1 didn't) but manufacturers were looking for features that made them stand out above the "official" Microsoft Windows mice and adding an extra button was one of them.
if there are multiple fibers running into one photocell, my guess is that they are not trying to sample on/off "bits" (with redundancy?), but rather sampling analog values to gauge the percentage of dot coverage. in other words, a sensor could discern if its site is on the very edge of a dot if the analog value is 25%. in this way, plotting an axis' sensors would produce a smooth linegraph rather than a sharp square waveform; which would be a lot more stable when trying to derive a statistical trend.
that's exactly what i'm thinking. the chip could easily have ADCs inside.
When I need to macgyver a mouse out of optical stuff and chunks of fiber, I should remember these videos.
Heads up that I very nearly missed this video because of the similarity between the thumbnails and titles on this and the Q500; if this video underperforms on view metrics that might be one factor!
the neoprene inside may just be for sound deadening or something mundane like that... or flame thrower resistance
Oh man, I thought they gave up on optical mice in the 80's. Never knew these "modern" ones existed. I grew up using the 3 button IBM XT mouse with the metal pad, back in the 80's. So I thought the switch to ball mice was weird. The older optical mouse seemed so much more elegant with no moving parts.
My guess would be that the Q500 was released slightly later than the Laser Mouse as the design is more "modern". It also strikes me that the implementation changes - the separation of the two axes, the drop to two sensors, and the switch to a neoprene mouse pad - were all cost cutting exercises. Bundling two lots of 8 fibres together and keeping them aligned, applying silicone, and then sorting the strands to send them to the appropriate sensor would likely have been a fiddly labour-intensive manual production process, but dealing with two pairs that can just be clamped and easily poked into the correct hole reduces BOM and assembly costs considerably. On top of that you have a lower overall part count and a general reduction in build quality (e.g. the plastic tab instead of screws) which definitely suggests to me that the Q500 was a cost-reduced revision.
I love the contrast of your normal ending speech, while the mouse is literally going mental, frantically thrashing the window that says "my computer" trying to assert dominance.
I think it was trying to say something.
i remember we used optical mouses in the mid 80's it was the M-2 Mouse from "data general" on the apple2 and PC. was a similar one for the SUN as well.
You should use a standard serial driver win Windows to see if the acceleration is on or off. It's a driver feature, not a hardware feature.
3:27 This is a really satisfying and understated edit
Two of them.
I bet those ICs are custom marked PIC (or other widespread) microcontrollers most likely in cheap OTP variants. This is common practice because obviously developing some special ASIC for things like these is economically impractical.
imagine this guy, technology connections, and aging wheels did a triple collab
FWIW- we had a SUN Microsystems workstation in the early 90s with an Optical Mouse that had a similar pad to that LMOX pad.
At the end your laptop become possessed
I knew it! I commented how I thought it worked in the previous video (just by looking at the bottom) and I was exactly right. Each line is "blurring" the whole pad in the desired direction, so it can observe one axis while the other one is averaged out.
Also I don't think the serial port is a problem, just the controller which is probably just as slow in the PS/2 version.
When I went to acommunity college in the 90s we had some similar optical mice.
There was something in the college charter that they couldn't donate or sell any excess or obsolete equipment. So everything was used until it broke then thrown away.
One day I was helping move things around the computer lab and we found a locked cupboard full of optical mice that cam with an optical mousepad.
I'm not sure if they are the same. There were a lot of first gen optical mice that needed a certain pattern to 'move'.
We put them on all the PCs and tossed the mice they came with.
Everyone complained.
I used to work inside an arc furnace in 1996 and we constantly had issues with our laser mice.
Thanks!
I think that by bundling the fibres together allows measuring intensity, so they could save some diodes. I guess that main issue is the square pattern, If they somehow managed to make it work an a hexagonal pattern, it could be less susceptible to different angles.
I'm having a moment just noticing the DNA Lounge sticker in the background! :D