Bored? Try a Kensington Expert Mouse Trackball

A place to discuss and exchange ideas on all types of control surfaces for PowerSDR and Thetis.
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kc2rgw
Posts: 165
Joined: Mon Jun 22, 2020 5:44 pm

Bored? Try a Kensington Expert Mouse Trackball

Postby kc2rgw » Thu Mar 11, 2021 6:33 pm

Just bored and have run trackballs a ton years back so I decided to pick up a shiny new Kensington Expert Mouse Trackball.

https://www.kensington.com/p/products/e ... trackball/

To start, this may drive people completely nuts as it requires a bit of brain/hand re-training if you've never used a trackball. Be warned, but I'm used to all sorts of input devices at this point and switching between them.

The thing that is kind of neat with this is that you can map the four buttons to do a bunch of things and it has a scroll ring around the center ball.

I set the scroll to reverse the pattern and it works nicely as a dial for tuning and for moving the level sliders. It's a neat function with Thetis and running the radio.

If covid has you bored and looking for a toy to play with, you may find this interesting. It takes a bit of experimenting with the software to set speed and acceleration for the pointer and scrolling and possibly mapping the buttons, but it seems pretty interesting so far.
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w-u-2-o
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Joined: Fri Mar 10, 2017 1:47 pm

Re: Bored? Try a Kensington Expert Mouse Trackball

Postby w-u-2-o » Thu Mar 11, 2021 7:18 pm

On a similar note, I've been trying to convince myself to add a Contour ShuttleXpress widget to my setup. But at the end of the day, neither that or the Kensington trackball is really any different than a mouse with a scroll wheel, especially a Logitech Hyperscroll wheel. And since you can get mice with extra function keys/buttons, that would be the more logical move.

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