On Aug 4, 2021, at 5:51 PM, John Floren <john(a)jfloren.net> wrote:
Having just been given a Depraz mouse, I thought it would be fun to get it working on my
modern computer. Since the DE9 connector is male rather than female as you usually see
with serial mice, and given its age, I speculate that it might have a custom protocol; in
any rate, plugging it into a USB-serial converter and and firing up picocom has given me
nothing.
Does anyone have a copy of a manual for it, or more information on how to interface with
it? If I knew how it was wired and what the protocol looked like, I expect I could make an
adapter pretty trivially using a microcontroller.
You'll likely need a couple of quadrature decoders as X1,X2 (& Y1,Y2) transitions
encode the direction of movement in X (& Y) axis. This may help:
http://www.mcmanis.com/chuck/robotics/projects/lab-x3/quadratrak.html
On a 'Pi may be you can just wire it up to a few GPIO pins (but you will need to
convert 5V signals to 3.3V to avoid damaging them).
-- Bakul