Logitech Trackball: Tilting Thereof

The right-hand trackball by my keyboard is a Logitech Cordless Optical Trackman, which I fixed a while ago with a laying-on-of-hands repair. If you do a lot of typing and want to save your wrists, a trackball might be just what you need.

This trackball’s shape is strongly right-handed and I found that my wrist was happier when I tilted the trackball about 30 degrees to the right, making the ball almost vertical and the thumb buttons to the upper left. Evidently my wrist wants to work at a more clockwise angle, not at whatever Logitech found suitable.

I made the platform from thin oak-veneer plywood left over from a bookshelf project, with oak wedges holding it up. Polyurethane glue, my favorite wood adhesive, holds everything together. I presented the bottom to the belt sander to get a nice flat surface and bevel the down-side edge of the platform, then applied non-skid rubber stair tread tape to the wedges.

Conveniently, Logitech held the trackball’s case together with four plastic-tapping screws. I removed a screws at each end, drilled two matching holes in the platform, and used similar-size machine screws. The threads don’t quite match, but it’s close enough.

Here’s what it looks like in use…

The platform makes battery replacement a bit more tedious. Much to my surprise, the two AA cells run for half a year at a time, so that’s not a big issue.

However, the trackball occasionally (every few weeks) loses sync with its base receiver, requiring a poke of buttons on both units. I think that’s partly due to the Logitech wireless mouse on my esteemed wife’s desk ten feet away.

On the whole, I like it a lot. If Logitech made one for southpaws, too, I’d get a bookend set, but they don’t.

Oh, yeah, if only evdev allowed button reconfiguration, without using a bunch of batshit kludges, I’d be ecstatic. As of the last time I fiddled with it, the standard mouse xorg driver couldn’t handle the number of buttons and evdev didn’t allow button mapping. Mostly, it works, but I’d like to reassign a few of the buttons.