@@Fazer_600 I was being ironic. My dad showed this to me already in the 90s or very early 2000s when he already had some digital camera prototypes from epson.
I remember as a kid I was the only one who ever cleaned those mouse rollers. It's still incredible to me how people could use a mouse with all that gunk inside.
So many times at work I'd be helping a coworker and their mouse would hardly move. Can't understand how they could work that way. I'd open it up and remove a ridiculous amount of gunk from the inside.
Been there, done that, got the tee-shirt. I've been in IT since the mid 1990s and I remember opto-mechanical mice and cleaning both the ball and the rollers inside. I also remember my employer bought a Sun Ultrasparc 4000 and that was the first time I ever saw an optical mouse and its special mouse pad. I was part of the team which migrated the company's software, data, and employee login credentials from the previous UNIX system to the new Ultrasparc 4000 system. Solaris for Sparc. Being in IT, not only did I clean the mouse ball and rollers for my own mouse, but for company staff too.
I played quake with an old Logitech Trackman Marble. Sure you can come at me with your optical mouse but my trackball would never fail, especially trick shots with the rail-gun !
Once my mouse broke down and my only spare was a graphic tablet. The mouse of the tablet didn't work great for Quake so I used the pen instead. I had a **** of a good time until there was a hard tap on my shoulder and when I turned around there were 8 angry guys standing behind me each with a spare mouse.
I remember when I was in high school, the rollers in the mice couldn't be cleaned because some school administrator had decided it would be a good idea to superglue all the ball covers "to keep people from stealing the balls". so people ended up throwing the entire mouse in the trash whenever the rollers would get too dirty, and the school would just buy a new mouse.
What's stupid is that's actually a thing. I remember finding a few mice without the balls inside at school. Not many, but some morons actually stole them. Of course by that time optical mice were becoming popular and cheap...
@@smpmuzpid You'd think that, but probably not -- unless you're getting a volume deal on the replacement balls, it was probably faster and cheaper to just toss the mouse. And if you were really determined to clean your mouse, you could just unscrew the case...
I figured out the solution for the gummed up mouse in the 90's: I had a table where the mouse ball would slide. So I taped a paper onto the desk as a makeshift mousepad. Turned out not only could I also use it as a note/scratchpad, it also kept the mouse clean! The gunk would end up on the paper and after a few months it was dirty and full of notes, so I switched it. I kept on doing that until optical mice took over.
@@countzero1136 Yes, the newer "Laser mouse" overcame that issue. I used a regular old mousepad for a camera-based mouse that didn't like my wife's black granite desktop. Laser mice were already taking over, so seemed old tech that this decorator mouse (bamboo mouse body) used the older generation technology.
Then TV turned to crap and we had to turn off the TV, because it messes with your mind. TVs became "smart" as the TV programming became more and more dumbed-down and misleading, even outright lying to us.
@@itszain6317 Well thanks. I remember "the good old days" when you could watch cool computer TV shows on TV. Computers were the new cool thing. Now computers have largely stagnated during the last decade. What does a modern computer even do, that a decade-old computer can not do?
@@ChaseMC215Oh, him? He gets more freedom, he also dies from time to time. But over time, you could be good friends with him with enough time and paitience.
This channel is like the museums should be. Less about staring at endless static and boring exhibitions and more about getting more knowledge and interest about how things were made in the past!
I went to the Ben Franklin museum and they explain everything perfectly and the history. I went to others that walk you through and describe the objects while history. Maybe you live in a place where museums suck. No hate btw. Hopefully your day is well.
@@squidslapper7328 most of them suck. It's usually about how well funded they are, but sometimes they still end up being very boring. I find it to be way more interesting to have a good guide person than an "interactive" wall if text on a tablet.
Wow, what a packed and super interesting episode. Last year, I ran into those opto-mechanical solution inside a Mac ADB Advanced Gravis MouseStick (I) and had to diagnose it before it started registering movement. I made a lengthy thread about it in the allaboutcircuits forum. Basically, the light wasn't picking enough light because of scratches in the plastic film on plastic film contact inside the wheel between LED and photoresistors. I had to up the voltage feeding the LEDs to make the whole sequence trigger. Most people owning these joystick have developed this problem over time so these 'duds' are unfortunately getting sold on eBay and most people don't realize it's an easy fix by turning a potentiometer for a bit. I went further down the rabbit hole this year by getting inspired by a custom thumbstick joystick getting interpreted by a very small Arduino which sent back the same kind of quadrature data, but digitally, to an old Macintosh serial port, so that it could replace the mouse in a Mac Plus, 512k, 128k or even Lisa. I mimicked the design and tried to improve on it while also making a gamepad case, 3d printed. Our designs and choices are documented in the hardware section of 68kmla forums.
@@theaveragecactus He's probably supporting the 8-Bit Guy on Patreon. I mean, Technology Connections actually releases videos a day early to Patreon supporters.
You missed the problems with the Mouse Systems pad optical mouse. I know you couldn't try it, but it does not act like an optomechanical mouse even if the way it measures movement is technically similar. The optomechanical mouse moves in the orientation of the mouse. The Mouse Systems pad optical mouse moves in the orientation of the pad, which meant that while it was very accurate, turning your hand any amount, as you do naturally, or having the pad at an incorrect orientation would cause the mouse to move in an unexpected direction. For most people, moving in the orientation of the mouse feels more natural. You could work with it when you had to like on a Sun workstation, but I had little patience. Using a ball mouse and dealing with the cleaning of the rollers was easier.
Interesting. I never really had that issue when I used such a mouse back in the day. I am sure it happened but I think is similar to the lack of issue I have with the up and down direction of a USB. Just something a lot of people encounter that I never really did and the few times I had a slight issue it was so slight and took so little time to correct that I forgot about it. It may be that I also had a more advanced later version of the grid pad optical mouse. Something that may have used grid for the sensor but was more akin to a modern optical mouse. It was such a long time ago for me, so I am not sure.
A lesson re-learned years later with the Apple puck mouse - the mouse with no orientable shape. A courageous endeavor in pushing the boundaries of form over function!
However, you could really annoy the person next to you with a 90s Sun workstation by moving the mouse mat round 90 degrees. So now, up with left and left was up. Small pleasures but you got to find happiness where you can.
What do you mean you didn't get a convincing answer? People have been hacking mouse sensors as really crappy cameras and explaining the same years ago lol. Here, this is from 10 years ago ruclips.net/video/bci7Gi05BNc/видео.html
@@GoldSrc_ People have search results 'tailored' to them by Google. What you see - even at the same time with the same search - is most likely entirely different than what they see.
Regarding reading mouse data, just go into anonymous mode and google "arduino mouse camera" and you find plenty of results along these lines, which work faster that the one presented here. @@ProGamer1515 I've seen Google not finding some obvious things, but not sure it tailors the results that much to user profiles, usually it's things it just doesn't index properly for anyone or jumbles it with many other unrelated things as to make the results useless. But that's not the case with this in my experience.
I worked in a school before optical mouses were common... We glued the mouse ball covers on so the balls wouldn't get stolen, so cleaning them required removing the cover. Fortunately it was one screw, and it really didn't take any longer than pulling the ball out.
i used to always clean the ball. i used to always throw it in the air and catch it LOL it was cool but one day i realized there was a lot of shit on the rollers and sensors so i cleaned them and i realized what i needed to do
My dad is a technician, he would always pull the gunk out of the inside with a pocket knife so that's how I learned to clean it (not with a pocket knife, of course).
@@kruleworld That sounds neat! I use digital mice these days, but I must admit the rollerball mice have a special charm about them. Even if they could get pretty yucky!
Back then, it was always the rollers. Now, many of the balls have degraded to the point where the rubber has gone ever so slightly stiff. Just enough so that it doesn't quite grip the rollers properly, and you get tracking issues. I've found that the Microsoft Serial Mouse 2.0/2.1 are still fairly reliable.
03:34 mouse roller gunk is some of the nastiest stuff ever. Thanks for taking me back to 2003 and cleaning out the mouse for my Dell Dimension desktop I made my first programming and gaming experiments on, lol.
@@mare65 I was wondering why they did 15x15 instead of 16x16. Maybe a reserved or null value? Or maybe it was easier to have a zero column (and row) where everything was offset relative to it. I don't know anything about engineering but this is fascinating.
Great video. I was the nerd in the computer lab that could do 'magic' things to mice by cleaning the rollers. Some of the kids used to get so worried when I'd pop the ball cover off and they'd see a flash of the circuit board.
You could save the image after each tiny movement and then compose all the saved images into animation. Viewing the animation will be more logical to understand what the mouse "sees"
I figured out all by myself that it was the wheels getting dirty. A fingernail did wonders for scraping gunk off. SOoooo satisfying to remove that stuff.
Ya me too and then I taught the other kids and teachers that trick. Because teachers would only have like 2 or 3 extra computer mouse in the class, and when a whole bunch of them had gummed up some of us would get stuck with gummed up ones. Now that I think about it, the teachers sent the computer mouse back to IT for maintenance/repairs because hardly anyone knew about cleaning the rollers...
@@spacefightertzz The optical equivalent, getting a cat, dog, or arm hair stuck in front of the eye, and that's more frustrating to deal with, harder to get out, and lacks that sense of accomplishment. On the plus side, it isn't as sure to happen as gumming balls.
Pretty neat that you wrote your own program to poll the sensor, though there are already people who have done this. There's even a program called mousecam which lets you more or less "scan" with the mouse, so you can read larger areas by moving around the mouse.
I had a Mouse Systems Amiga mouse back in the 90s - absolutely brilliant at the time, so long as you kept the mouse perfectly straight! Angle it a bit and the pointer starts to do the Lambada.
If he has an iPhone, it probably won't show IR light. I've tried with friends' iPhones and it never worked. Looking at the very same TV remote or surveillance camera using my Android smartphone's camera always showed the IR light - the fruity phones I've tried never did. Assuming the TV remote had good batteries and was in good working order or the surveillance camera was in night mode. Ditto for elevator door light curtains. Where I live, elevators are required to have light curtains between the doors and typically, light in the IR spectrum is used. If an object breaks the light curtain between the elevator doors, the doors either remain open or, if they are in the process of closing - they stop and re-open. It is a safety requirement. Most elevator companies enable a feature called "nudging" whereby after a preset amount of time, even if the light curtain is broken, the doors will still attempt to close (albeit with reduced force, I think). This is to prevent someone from holding an elevator indefinitely while other people are waiting (on other floors).
Not having any "cellphone" (or any gameboy), I would simply use one of my old digital cameras for that type of task. Their sensors see infrared too, of course.
@@frederickevans4113 What? You mean iPhone cameras don't pick IR light? Why is that? I thought ANY camera could do that. Even my ancient VHS-C camera from the early 90s could pick up IR lights from remotes.
@@OMA2k I think the fruit company put a filter on their cameras, either a physical one in the camera's lens, or a software one in the image processing. It might be a safety/modesty thing following the Sony camcorder IR nudes/semi-nudes from the late 1990s. Going purely from memory, please research it. Sony had introduced a feature called "Night Shot" into their line of camcorders 📹. It included IR illumination to help brighten night time video recording. According to the story, no one at Sony tried it in daylight. In direct sunlight, there was enough IR light (from the ☀) that the camera could see through a single layer of clothing. After months on the market and millions of these camcorders had shipped, Sony was inundated with requests to explain how to use the x-ray vision feature. When Sony tried to issue a recall, most individuals and many stores were less than enthusiastic to return the camcorders. The next version Sony released still had the "Night Shot" feature, but it was disabled in direct sunlight. If I remember the story correctly. I don't know for sure, but I suspect that the Sony camcorder story might have influenced the fruit company to filter their mobile device cameras.
Your videos turn a topic which is very confusing to understand for most people and makes it simple to understand. Thank you David for making such interesting content, and explaining it really well.
7:58 "Now you'd think all I need to do now is read register B here, which is pixel grab." No, no I did not think that, let alone think at all when the data sheet was displayed..
Benjamin Lum its actually not too difficult to understand, its all laid out on the datasheet, for example take the register Motion at 0x02, so since its using a byte it has 8 bits, below the chart with the registers it lists in detail the bits and the fields and what they mean, like for Motion it says bit 7 (it starts at 0 so 7 is actually the 8th bit) is MOT which it says is motion since last reported which returns two values, 1 or 0, 1 meaning motion has occurred, 0 meaning no motion, with the rest of the bits reserved. What this tells us is that you can read at 0x02 and the 7th bit will tell you whether or not motion has occurred. If you’re interested in reading more for yourself you can find this particular datasheet at media.digikey.com/pdf/Data%20Sheets/Avago%20PDFs/ADNS-5030.pdf
I recently cleaned a few of mine up - definitely a flashback. Did you know, the balls in Microsoft mice, when the rubber coating is removed, fit into paintball guns near perfectly? :D
There was an old project posted on Hackaday where someone managed to used one of those sensors kind of like a scanner. Obviously the resolution from the 18x18 CCD was very low but the result was pretty impressive for what it was. It definitely blew my mind at the time. Unfortunately the link is now dead.
3:58 If i don't remember it wrong the direction of the movement was always how the mouse pad was placed and not how you hold the mouse. You could turn the mouse the other direction but the mouse pointer moved up even if the mouse cable was against you.
Aha! So they are watching us, through little cameras on our computer mice. But they say that the cameras do not remember anything, only report x and y positions and button presses. Yeah, sure. Hard to imagine that there are so many types of optical mice.
@@smpmuzpid From what I understand, that's only for midroll ads. I don't have the timestamp of the OP's situation, but I (possibly erroneously) figured it'd be for the end of the video ("Thanks for watching.").
Kinda reminds me of the Wii's IR sensor. At first glance it seems like it tracks IR light sources - which of course, it does. But how it does that is basically that it's a 128x96 black and white camera with an IR filter, and a built in processing chip that takes the 4 brightest readings, interpolates the pixel intensity values to essentially determine the coordinates as though it was a 1024x768 image, and then send those coordinates + a 4 bit brightness value on to whatever hardware you connect it to... I guess optical mice are kind of doing a similar thing...
@@AkhyarMaulanaPangeranWeb I would say, that the reason is latency: You can make a faster MCU when you seperate it from the sensor. And the faster the MCU can process the sensor data, the faster you can move your mouse cursor and therefore in games where the crosshair of your weapon looks too. Don't forget, when you have a 144 fps screen, your mouse must at least send the position data 144 times a second to the computer, so that you can move your mouse without lag.
Little bit of trivia for the 90s kids: The analog sticks on the Nintendo 64 controllers used optical encoders much in the same fashion as old ball mice meaning they were mostly digital as the encoders can only detect a set distance from the assumed center in so many exact increments. But by being able to detect so many small increments of movement, it essentially "emulated" true analog control as far as the end user was concerned. Probably the only thing that gives it away is the very subtle "ratcheting" feedback you can feel when rotating it, that's the plastic teeth on the encoder discs.
You probably have an Android smartphone. All my friends' fruity smartphones I've tried that with have failed to see the IR light. I have a Samsung Galaxy S7 and it sees IR (as did the GS5 and GS2 I had before). If you have a smartphone capable of seeing IR, that is one way to check the batteries in your TV remote. Pressing buttons: good batteries = blinking light, bad batteries (or faulty remote) = nothing.
I actually found the old rollerball mice a little more reliable, drives me nuts with optical that a single hair getting inside the case an infront of the laser will send it doolally.
@@bonkybonk_ow2793 Hes right, an optical mouse wont work right on a surface thats highly reflective or lacks trackable features such as patternation or contrasting colours.
Me: "What a great and interesting episode!" 8BG: "Stick around for the next episode, where I talk about the Mini-PET!" Me: "AN 8BG CLIFFHANGER, WHYYYYYY"
@YOLO MAN It's not like there's a human on the other side listening, like in the movies. Your phone always listen to you, convert speech to text and send to cloud periodically, stored in your profile on the cloud at very little cost. The machines work 24/7, and the data actually generate profit for the company, so tell me why wouldn't they do it
you have it backwards with the light diagrams, if the light picking up is the input. Movement downward would show light on the bottom pixel first, then the top, so so forth. From what I can tell, you have the whole thing backward in terms of spatial reasoning. maybe Im wrong.
I also had a mouse with such a special pad for my XT PC, connected via serial port. At some point that pad was falling apart and I had no money to replace it. So what I did was simple: I printed a similar pattern as was on that pad using my 24 pin needle printer of that time on ordinary paper. Of course, I couldn't print as fine as the original pattern was but it was fine enough, the movement was just a bit slower. Finally I got a very thin, transparent piece of hard plastic as a cover and the replacement was done. While not good as the original, it kept that mouse alive and I could re-print it as often as needed. As you can see, my mouse was already a bit newer and did not work with two different kinds of light, it just required a pattern of tiny squares, circles, or octagons (I tried all three and all of them worked). When I got a new computer, I also went back to a mouse with a ball even though they got dirty, their movement was just smoother until the first real optical mice were available for affordable prices.
![Seungmin "그렇게, 천천히, 우리(As we are)" | [Stray Kids : SKZ-PLAYER]](http://i.ytimg.com/vi/kAzmhLHePqU/mqdefault.jpg)
_"What does a computer mouse see?"_
Mouse: _I've seen horrible things_
It has seen things no man shall see.
"I've... seen things you people wouldn't believe" (a Mouse, probably...)
I misread the 8 in 148 for a B lol.
@@randomgecko4637 where? timestamp? and what does that mean??
@@yash1152 Back when this comment had 148 likes, I thought the 8 was a B and saw it as 14B likes.
"let's take a look with a Gameboy camera" - weird flex but okay.
The nerd factor is high with that line
My reaction was like: Sure that's the only camera he got sensitive to IR, alright.
When watch with the GB camera, both looks, maybe is so fast how for read in a screen
Is interesting
@@Fazer_600 I was being ironic. My dad showed this to me already in the 90s or very early 2000s when he already had some digital camera prototypes from epson.
4:28 That's a Humble brag!
Yo, massive props to the camera man he had to be stuffed into a mouse.
Ikr how the fuck did they do it?
ccc310 Wtf bro thats insane!
Not exactly a feat... In all the movies I've seen the cameraman *and* the camera are invisible.
I love you
Not a single woooosh? I am surprised
"What does it see?"
**minecraft texture pack**
*Gravel*
Sans Cat I was thinking the same
Lol
YES
It's the ash block in rl craft
I remember as a kid I was the only one who ever cleaned those mouse rollers. It's still incredible to me how people could use a mouse with all that gunk inside.
So many times at work I'd be helping a coworker and their mouse would hardly move. Can't understand how they could work that way. I'd open it up and remove a ridiculous amount of gunk from the inside.
Been there, done that, got the tee-shirt. I've been in IT since the mid 1990s and I remember opto-mechanical mice and cleaning both the ball and the rollers inside. I also remember my employer bought a Sun Ultrasparc 4000 and that was the first time I ever saw an optical mouse and its special mouse pad. I was part of the team which migrated the company's software, data, and employee login credentials from the previous UNIX system to the new Ultrasparc 4000 system. Solaris for Sparc. Being in IT, not only did I clean the mouse ball and rollers for my own mouse, but for company staff too.
You Can Remove it?It won't need to be replaced?
@@Dennis_MK yes!no! ;)
“What does a computer mouse see?”
me looking at the thumbnail: Minecraft gravel?
Cobblestone.... but ok.
@@dedinside6085 no way, it totally looks like gravel
@@soup6482 i see it now
Same
@🇨🇦 TheRealLoganYT 🇨🇦 it does look similar to it. And you can't "woosh" someone on their own joke.
"I've seen things you people wouldn't believe" - 1st ever optical mouse
is that a blade runner reference
"All those moments will be lost in time, like tears in rain. Time to die." - Last ever optical mouse
Cubic Apocalypse A man of culture
fechaqui 95 damn I love that movie lol
ahh, ball mouse. when dying in quake meant you had a valid excuse to blame it on the mouse even if it wasn't true.
"Lag..."
I played quake with an old Logitech Trackman Marble. Sure you can come at me with your optical mouse but my trackball would never fail, especially trick shots with the rail-gun !
@@vincentlamb3436 I'm playing with a Logitech MX Ergo trackball. Everyone makes fun of me but it's a dream to use.
Once my mouse broke down and my only spare was a graphic tablet. The mouse of the tablet didn't work great for Quake so I used the pen instead. I had a **** of a good time until there was a hard tap on my shoulder and when I turned around there were 8 angry guys standing behind me each with a spare mouse.
@@pingaslord9726 yes the apex of trackball evolution, im not laughing here!
See this is why I prefer trackballs: they aren't watching me.
What, do you place your mouse upside down
Fax xD
track🅱️alls 🤨
But they track you in other ways tho. That's why they're called TRACKballs
Or are they?
Me: playing Minecraft.
My computer mouse: EVERYTHING IS COBBLESTONE.
apparently im not the only one playing minecraft and watching this
Wait, it's all cobblestone?
Always has been.
That's what i was thinking haha
Death Death Revolution huh yt recommended and minecraft is the most popular game in existence
@@deathdeathrevolution3499 Of course not
I remember when I was in high school, the rollers in the mice couldn't be cleaned because some school administrator had decided it would be a good idea to superglue all the ball covers "to keep people from stealing the balls". so people ended up throwing the entire mouse in the trash whenever the rollers would get too dirty, and the school would just buy a new mouse.
I went to a school like that. the covers were super-glued.
What's stupid is that's actually a thing. I remember finding a few mice without the balls inside at school. Not many, but some morons actually stole them. Of course by that time optical mice were becoming popular and cheap...
@@smpmuzpid Well, they always had more of someone else's money.
@@smpmuzpid You'd think that, but probably not -- unless you're getting a volume deal on the replacement balls, it was probably faster and cheaper to just toss the mouse. And if you were really determined to clean your mouse, you could just unscrew the case...
“Stealing the balls”... ...BALLS... ...😂
I am so grateful for optical mice! Never having to clean them, having them work on any surface, and so on are just such huge improvements!
Any surface, except for a glass table. Ball mice were superior for that 😉
Not just glass but glossy surfaces in general is terrible for optical mice
The Mouse is really an amazing invention
Agreed.
I swear I’ve seen you on a bunch of videos I have seen.....
You are everywhere in comments
Imagine using an analog stick to move a cursor
I think Trackpads are even more amazing 😄
I figured out the solution for the gummed up mouse in the 90's: I had a table where the mouse ball would slide. So I taped a paper onto the desk as a makeshift mousepad. Turned out not only could I also use it as a note/scratchpad, it also kept the mouse clean! The gunk would end up on the paper and after a few months it was dirty and full of notes, so I switched it. I kept on doing that until optical mice took over.
I thought I was the only one doing that!! I guess I’m not alone :D
Optical mice don't like highly polished desks though, so paper mousepads still have their uses :)
@@countzero1136 Yes, the newer "Laser mouse" overcame that issue. I used a regular old mousepad for a camera-based mouse that didn't like my wife's black granite desktop. Laser mice were already taking over, so seemed old tech that this decorator mouse (bamboo mouse body) used the older generation technology.
damn boy, i just cleared up the gunk.. manually.. every 2 weeks or so ..
Big brain
This channel should be on television. It reminds me of all the computer shows I used to watch in the 1980s.
1980s? Dang u must be old
Thanks for 700 😘
abb 710 kra do plzz😭❤
Love you all 💞💕💝
Then TV turned to crap and we had to turn off the TV, because it messes with your mind. TVs became "smart" as the TV programming became more and more dumbed-down and misleading, even outright lying to us.
@@itszain6317
Well thanks. I remember "the good old days" when you could watch cool computer TV shows on TV. Computers were the new cool thing. Now computers have largely stagnated during the last decade. What does a modern computer even do, that a decade-old computer can not do?
It's a good day when the 8 bit guy uploads.
@@QuarTheDev True
@Snackers explain
@Snackers how so?
@Snackers Explain your logic
Yeah
We mostly see the mouse pad and our owner's hands. It's kinda boring most of the time.
Considering that you're focused to a distance of only a few millimeters, I'm surprised you'd see the owner's hands and not just some smudge.
@@ovalteen4404 They see *everything*.
What about your distand reletive, the Wireless Mice?
Username checks out
@@ChaseMC215Oh, him? He gets more freedom, he also dies from time to time. But over time, you could be good friends with him with enough time and paitience.
This channel is like the museums should be. Less about staring at endless static and boring exhibitions and more about getting more knowledge and interest about how things were made in the past!
I went to the Ben Franklin museum and they explain everything perfectly and the history. I went to others that walk you through and describe the objects while history. Maybe you live in a place where museums suck. No hate btw. Hopefully your day is well.
@@squidslapper7328 most of them suck. It's usually about how well funded they are, but sometimes they still end up being very boring. I find it to be way more interesting to have a good guide person than an "interactive" wall if text on a tablet.
69 likes nice
Ok boomer
exactly this is how history should be portrayed.
Wow, what a packed and super interesting episode. Last year, I ran into those opto-mechanical solution inside a Mac ADB Advanced Gravis MouseStick (I) and had to diagnose it before it started registering movement. I made a lengthy thread about it in the allaboutcircuits forum. Basically, the light wasn't picking enough light because of scratches in the plastic film on plastic film contact inside the wheel between LED and photoresistors. I had to up the voltage feeding the LEDs to make the whole sequence trigger. Most people owning these joystick have developed this problem over time so these 'duds' are unfortunately getting sold on eBay and most people don't realize it's an easy fix by turning a potentiometer for a bit.
I went further down the rabbit hole this year by getting inspired by a custom thumbstick joystick getting interpreted by a very small Arduino which sent back the same kind of quadrature data, but digitally, to an old Macintosh serial port, so that it could replace the mouse in a Mac Plus, 512k, 128k or even Lisa. I mimicked the design and tried to improve on it while also making a gamepad case, 3d printed. Our designs and choices are documented in the hardware section of 68kmla forums.
how.....
Mu0n
17 hours ago (edited)
@@theaveragecactus He's probably supporting the 8-Bit Guy on Patreon. I mean, Technology Connections actually releases videos a day early to Patreon supporters.
Hmm, mate, since you are so enthusiastic about this?
Why is a hole on bottom of a mouse, - is shaped like a key hole?
Yup, I support the patreon and the videos are up the day before
You missed the problems with the Mouse Systems pad optical mouse. I know you couldn't try it, but it does not act like an optomechanical mouse even if the way it measures movement is technically similar. The optomechanical mouse moves in the orientation of the mouse. The Mouse Systems pad optical mouse moves in the orientation of the pad, which meant that while it was very accurate, turning your hand any amount, as you do naturally, or having the pad at an incorrect orientation would cause the mouse to move in an unexpected direction. For most people, moving in the orientation of the mouse feels more natural. You could work with it when you had to like on a Sun workstation, but I had little patience. Using a ball mouse and dealing with the cleaning of the rollers was easier.
Interesting. I never really had that issue when I used such a mouse back in the day. I am sure it happened but I think is similar to the lack of issue I have with the up and down direction of a USB. Just something a lot of people encounter that I never really did and the few times I had a slight issue it was so slight and took so little time to correct that I forgot about it.
It may be that I also had a more advanced later version of the grid pad optical mouse. Something that may have used grid for the sensor but was more akin to a modern optical mouse. It was such a long time ago for me, so I am not sure.
Weird I have a Sun 3/80 workstation I use quite a lot and I never even noticed. Gonna have to try and get it to mess up now lol
A lesson re-learned years later with the Apple puck mouse - the mouse with no orientable shape. A courageous endeavor in pushing the boundaries of form over function!
I wondered if this exact same issue would arise when he explained how it worked. Thanks for confirming that this is indeed what happened!
However, you could really annoy the person next to you with a 90s Sun workstation by moving the mouse mat round 90 degrees. So now, up with left and left was up. Small pleasures but you got to find happiness where you can.
*”what does a mouse see?”*
A mouse cursor: Uhhh I’ve been seeing a anime pad and being flinged into the wall
Copied
@@flipflop6633 everything on the internet is copied nerd
@@libee1881 that is not a proper argument
@@flipflop6633 never tried to make an argument. I'm just stating a simple fact. You can never say or write anything that isn't copied.
@@libee1881 Lmao he stopped, you win
I googled this question just a few days back and didn't get a convincing answer... This is so perfectly timed!
:D
XD
What do you mean you didn't get a convincing answer?
People have been hacking mouse sensors as really crappy cameras and explaining the same years ago lol.
Here, this is from 10 years ago ruclips.net/video/bci7Gi05BNc/видео.html
@@GoldSrc_ People have search results 'tailored' to them by Google. What you see - even at the same time with the same search - is most likely entirely different than what they see.
Regarding reading mouse data, just go into anonymous mode and google "arduino mouse camera" and you find plenty of results along these lines, which work faster that the one presented here.
@@ProGamer1515 I've seen Google not finding some obvious things, but not sure it tailors the results that much to user profiles, usually it's things it just doesn't index properly for anyone or jumbles it with many other unrelated things as to make the results useless. But that's not the case with this in my experience.
I don’t missing cleaning mouse balls. Or anyone’s balls.
People have nostalgia about the weirdest things. "Hey guys don't you miss mullets and having people pretend to play keytars on TV?!?!"
I worked in a school before optical mouses were common... We glued the mouse ball covers on so the balls wouldn't get stolen, so cleaning them required removing the cover.
Fortunately it was one screw, and it really didn't take any longer than pulling the ball out.
😂😂😂
Hmmm
Something wrong is incorrect
Ah yes, my computer mouse sees a mixture of blocky gravel and blocky cobblestone.
Title : "what does a computer mouse see ?"
Thumbnail : cobblestone
Desk Cat.
Lol that's what made be click on the video
Looks more like gravel
@@harrasika i agree
Minecraft alpha cobblestone
3:07 I always cleaned the ball... My whole life was a lie
i used to always clean the ball.
i used to always throw it in the air and catch it LOL
it was cool
but one day i realized there was a lot of shit on the rollers and sensors so i cleaned them and i realized what i needed to do
My dad is a technician, he would always pull the gunk out of the inside with a pocket knife so that's how I learned to clean it (not with a pocket knife, of course).
I was 1 years old when those mouse came I think-
@@kruleworld That sounds neat! I use digital mice these days, but I must admit the rollerball mice have a special charm about them. Even if they could get pretty yucky!
I remember doing this as a kid. Just used my nail to scrape the rollers, never even thought about cleaning the ball, because it didn't look dirty 😋
You are the first youtuber that i watched the video without skipping a second.
Ah, yes, that is the exact thing i should be watching in 2 am
Im watching this At 2 AM ;-;
@@marqon6004 same
What the same :○
@@marqon6004 same
its 1:54am for me right now... yep xd
Ah, the memories of having to periodically clean the crud off the rollers when the mouse stopped working.
And all the tech support calls for the same!
Ah, the old days of cleaning the rollers using a Bic pen cap...
I still do. Using a logitech M-BA47 .
I've heard of people collecting belly button lint and earwax. I wonder if somebody out there collects mouse ball crud. 🤣🤢
Back then, it was always the rollers. Now, many of the balls have degraded to the point where the rubber has gone ever so slightly stiff. Just enough so that it doesn't quite grip the rollers properly, and you get tracking issues. I've found that the Microsoft Serial Mouse 2.0/2.1 are still fairly reliable.
Thumbnail: What does a computer mouse see?
My brain: Looks like the old Cobblestone texture from Minecraft
It's basalt texture lolz
Or a new Tuff texture...
coal ore
I saw the same thing xD
Looks exactly like gravel wtf?
man's answering the questions i didn't even know i was askin
I love how calmly you just say you're going to write a program by looking at its datasheet.
03:34 mouse roller gunk is some of the nastiest stuff ever. Thanks for taking me back to 2003 and cleaning out the mouse for my Dell Dimension desktop I made my first programming and gaming experiments on, lol.
So...what you're telling me is that MY CLASSMATES IN ZOOM WERE USING THEIR MOUSES FOR THEIR WEBCAMS?
Yea so low quality
N64 mouses*
@@niffuM4205 nah bro it's mice
@@someguystudios23 mouses*
@@niffuM4205 in computing it's actually both.
me: trying to sleep
8-bit guy: Wanna learn about Mouse Mechanisms!?
It was honestly worth the lost sleep.
bwgti i can agree on this
It’s 6:28 in the morning and I’m going to sleep now...
@@vibaj16 12 am here
Scraping those rollers clean was sooooooo satisfying lol
"there are only 224 pixels" - 225, dammit!
That would be the most cursed number as it's not divisible by 8.
@@mare65 I was wondering why they did 15x15 instead of 16x16. Maybe a reserved or null value? Or maybe it was easier to have a zero column (and row) where everything was offset relative to it. I don't know anything about engineering but this is fascinating.
This is why I watch you, David. I learn so much about how things work and the evolution of things that I use everyday.
"What does a mouse see?"
Mouse: I see pad, people.
Looks like a 2009 first release minecraft cobblestone texture
My toe is clean
@@rylscrbblr *T O E S*
Yes
Hu the old days of minecraft its nostalgic
Nah it looks like old gravel
Great video. I was the nerd in the computer lab that could do 'magic' things to mice by cleaning the rollers. Some of the kids used to get so worried when I'd pop the ball cover off and they'd see a flash of the circuit board.
You could save the image after each tiny movement and then compose all the saved images into animation. Viewing the animation will be more logical to understand what the mouse "sees"
I figured out all by myself that it was the wheels getting dirty. A fingernail did wonders for scraping gunk off. SOoooo satisfying to remove that stuff.
Ya me too and then I taught the other kids and teachers that trick. Because teachers would only have like 2 or 3 extra computer mouse in the class, and when a whole bunch of them had gummed up some of us would get stuck with gummed up ones. Now that I think about it, the teachers sent the computer mouse back to IT for maintenance/repairs because hardly anyone knew about cleaning the rollers...
@@spacefightertzz The optical equivalent, getting a cat, dog, or arm hair stuck in front of the eye, and that's more frustrating to deal with, harder to get out, and lacks that sense of accomplishment. On the plus side, it isn't as sure to happen as gumming balls.
How did people think it was the balls? You open it and take the ball out, the rollers have a ton of junk of them and the ball is spotless.
Pretty neat that you wrote your own program to poll the sensor, though there are already people who have done this. There's even a program called mousecam which lets you more or less "scan" with the mouse, so you can read larger areas by moving around the mouse.
Switch & Lever yep but I guess that takes away the fun of programming your own code on the Maximite
Link?
@@ramsesvelasco never said anything else.
@@martin_hansen easily findable with Google, oftentimes RUclips comments with links just get flagged as spam.
@@SwitchAndLever RUclips has gotten really close to NK with their censorship of videos and comments. It's really frustrating and sad.
I'm glad this video blew up in many people's recommendations.. have been a follower since forever!
I had a Mouse Systems Amiga mouse back in the 90s - absolutely brilliant at the time, so long as you kept the mouse perfectly straight! Angle it a bit and the pointer starts to do the Lambada.
I admined a Sun box with one of them until 2012.. it was apparently in service until 2014
I had a C64 with GEOS and a mouse.
I've always wondered how these mice worked. Thank you!
Dude uses a gameboy camera instead of just a cellphone. He's showing off at this point.
If he has an iPhone, it probably won't show IR light. I've tried with friends' iPhones and it never worked. Looking at the very same TV remote or surveillance camera using my Android smartphone's camera always showed the IR light - the fruity phones I've tried never did. Assuming the TV remote had good batteries and was in good working order or the surveillance camera was in night mode.
Ditto for elevator door light curtains. Where I live, elevators are required to have light curtains between the doors and typically, light in the IR spectrum is used. If an object breaks the light curtain between the elevator doors, the doors either remain open or, if they are in the process of closing - they stop and re-open. It is a safety requirement. Most elevator companies enable a feature called "nudging" whereby after a preset amount of time, even if the light curtain is broken, the doors will still attempt to close (albeit with reduced force, I think). This is to prevent someone from holding an elevator indefinitely while other people are waiting (on other floors).
Not having any "cellphone" (or any gameboy), I would simply use one of my old digital cameras for that type of task. Their sensors see infrared too, of course.
@@frederickevans4113 What? You mean iPhone cameras don't pick IR light? Why is that? I thought ANY camera could do that. Even my ancient VHS-C camera from the early 90s could pick up IR lights from remotes.
@@OMA2k I think the fruit company put a filter on their cameras, either a physical one in the camera's lens, or a software one in the image processing.
It might be a safety/modesty thing following the Sony camcorder IR nudes/semi-nudes from the late 1990s. Going purely from memory, please research it. Sony had introduced a feature called "Night Shot" into their line of camcorders 📹. It included IR illumination to help brighten night time video recording. According to the story, no one at Sony tried it in daylight. In direct sunlight, there was enough IR light (from the ☀) that the camera could see through a single layer of clothing. After months on the market and millions of these camcorders had shipped, Sony was inundated with requests to explain how to use the x-ray vision feature. When Sony tried to issue a recall, most individuals and many stores were less than enthusiastic to return the camcorders. The next version Sony released still had the "Night Shot" feature, but it was disabled in direct sunlight. If I remember the story correctly.
I don't know for sure, but I suspect that the Sony camcorder story might have influenced the fruit company to filter their mobile device cameras.
To troll, for the picture of what the mouse sees you could've used an image of a piece of cheese.
0:36 I used to have an Amstrad PC-1640, which had get another mouse connector variant.
I remember the cold metal Sun mouse mats.
Your videos turn a topic which is very confusing to understand for most people and makes it simple to understand.
Thank you David for making such interesting content, and explaining it really well.
7:58 "Now you'd think all I need to do now is read register B here, which is pixel grab."
No, no I did not think that, let alone think at all when the data sheet was displayed..
Benjamin Lum its actually not too difficult to understand, its all laid out on the datasheet, for example take the register Motion at 0x02, so since its using a byte it has 8 bits, below the chart with the registers it lists in detail the bits and the fields and what they mean, like for Motion it says bit 7 (it starts at 0 so 7 is actually the 8th bit) is MOT which it says is motion since last reported which returns two values, 1 or 0, 1 meaning motion has occurred, 0 meaning no motion, with the rest of the bits reserved. What this tells us is that you can read at 0x02 and the 7th bit will tell you whether or not motion has occurred.
If you’re interested in reading more for yourself you can find this particular datasheet at media.digikey.com/pdf/Data%20Sheets/Avago%20PDFs/ADNS-5030.pdf
I remember cleaning the rollers (not the ball) on my mouse in the 90's. Oh the things kids today miss out on :-)
Same here. Same 'ol process every week or so ;-)
I recently cleaned a few of mine up - definitely a flashback. Did you know, the balls in Microsoft mice, when the rubber coating is removed, fit into paintball guns near perfectly? :D
@@the_kombinator Oh my, thats 200 fps of danger there lol
yeah, I used my fingernails for that. In retrospect I should probably have used a better tool. Ah well. It worked.
The satisfaction of clearing the curd of the rollers.
This video made me appreciate The Mouse even more! Great job as always! 👍🏼🖱️
"What does it see?"
*deep fried minecraft*
There was an old project posted on Hackaday where someone managed to used one of those sensors kind of like a scanner. Obviously the resolution from the 18x18 CCD was very low but the result was pretty impressive for what it was. It definitely blew my mind at the time. Unfortunately the link is now dead.
3:58 If i don't remember it wrong the direction of the movement was always how the mouse pad was placed and not how you hold the mouse. You could turn the mouse the other direction but the mouse pointer moved up even if the mouse cable was against you.
Ah, perfect. An 8-bit upload just as I finished preparing dinner. I know what I'll be watching whilst dining!
So, guys... what's for dinner?
R.C. Whitehead RICE
2:24 back in the day, we called these RPGs - rotary pulse generators.
Thank you, I will now be using this. ...whenever the opportunity presents itself.
TSA officer: Any sharps or other illegal items in your luggage?
Me: Only a couple RPGs, nothing to worry about...
@@Scwarzkop TSA officer rebooks you on a flight to Guantanamo.
And last time i poked around a cheap MS branded mouse, it was still used to drive the scroll wheel.
Today we call these encoders...
Title: "what does a mouse see"
The video: *literally explains every part of a mouse*
Learning is fun, isn't it? ^_^
@@aurelia8028 not really, gaming is better
Good
@@itzbarros Yeah but we learn while gaming?
So what webcam do you use?
Me: *MOUSE*
nice
What about gameboy camera?
@@CT-rn6ms no that's too high quality
to train a neural network to be able to do facial recognition 🤣
Watching him cut out the microcontroller instead of desoldering it hurt me a little.
Desoldering is a pain in the ass!
Watching a good desoldering is a bit therapeutic, for some reason.
Awesome video, I always enjoy watching guys like you explain common everyday items.
Everybody gangsta till the mouse starts moving on the Z axis. 😔😔😫😫😫👊👊😳😳
The emojis killed it for me
@@boomrr07 😫😫👊👊😳😳
@@boomrr07 they were ironic and basically poking fun at stupid RUclips titiles
@@boomrr07 😔😔😫😫😫👊👊😳😳 ok.
@@boomrr07 banana sprite
God I hope my mouse can’t see.
Think about the 🐹 hamsters too.
Or smell or feel
Don't worry. It can only "see" stuff less than 1cm away.
As long as it only "sees" the table, I am fine with that.
there's not much that a 15x15 mouse with a fixed lens that's focused on stuff that's about a centimetre away from it can see lol
Aha! So they are watching us, through little cameras on our computer mice. But they say that the cameras do not remember anything, only report x and y positions and button presses. Yeah, sure.
Hard to imagine that there are so many types of optical mice.
4:41 Wow, I think you just fixed a broken pixel in my eye!
Next video: “What does my microwave see?”
Microwaves can't see anything.
@@TheAbsoluteProduction Yeah not goona lie they cant see
microwave:
*_mmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm_*
Microwave be like blind tho
food
what a mouse sees when a streamer rages?
"Thanks for what?" [AD] "Ching!"
Nice ad placement Google. Stellar job.
That thing with cramming a last-second ad into videos started pretty recently. Pretty irritating if I don't have ads disabled.
Google doesn't place the ads. The uploader does. The uploader doesn't choose what's advertised, though.
@@smpmuzpid From what I understand, that's only for midroll ads. I don't have the timestamp of the OP's situation, but I (possibly erroneously) figured it'd be for the end of the video ("Thanks for watching.").
@@dgpsf Where are you located? My visits the the US indicated they have more ads there. It's annoying indeed.
@@dgpsf Are you a RUclips shill? Adblock Plus removes all that shit for free...
Those Sun optical mice from the early/mid-‘90’s with the reflective pads... man, the memories I have of those days,
Cleaning the wheels on an old mouse was always so satisfying.
Andy" Thanks for wa-advertisement starts playing-tching" end of the video
Using the Gameboy Camera to see the infrared light was a stroke of brilliance.
you can use any camera really
@@jokuemt not really, lower quality cameras can detect infrared better, go try it with your TV remote.
The veiw of the mouse in the thumbnail do be modded Minecraft coal
Me seeing this video title in my notification: Uhh.........the mousepad
c'mon... thanks for the spoilers mate
Trivia: modern gaming mice still typically have independent MCU and sensor chips.
@@smpmuzpid That's what she said...
Sorry. Had to do it.
yes because they use more bigger camera
@@AkhyarMaulanaPangeranWeb it's more about the processing they do being a lot more elaborate, they're not JUST cameras, they're also DSPs
Kinda reminds me of the Wii's IR sensor.
At first glance it seems like it tracks IR light sources - which of course, it does.
But how it does that is basically that it's a 128x96 black and white camera with an IR filter, and a built in processing chip that takes the 4 brightest readings, interpolates the pixel intensity values to essentially determine the coordinates as though it was a 1024x768 image, and then send those coordinates + a 4 bit brightness value on to whatever hardware you connect it to...
I guess optical mice are kind of doing a similar thing...
@@AkhyarMaulanaPangeranWeb I would say, that the reason is latency: You can make a faster MCU when you seperate it from the sensor. And the faster the MCU can process the sensor data, the faster you can move your mouse cursor and therefore in games where the crosshair of your weapon looks too. Don't forget, when you have a 144 fps screen, your mouse must at least send the position data 144 times a second to the computer, so that you can move your mouse without lag.
Imagine having a ball inside your gaming mouse
"And yes, it exist."
This post was made by modern pc gang
Imagine needing a mouse pad
This post was made by poor gang
@@gabrieldabriel Imagine using a separate mouse.
This post was made by the Laptop touch-pad gang.
@@argonauts56au1kera6 imagine using a touchpad
THIS POST BROUGHT TO YOU BY THE IBM TRACKPOINT GANG.
@Jacob daemonspudguy Tice Imagine using a pointer or mouse.
This post was made by the Keyboard only gang.
I have fond memories of once a month taking my Q-Tips diped in Isopropyl alcohol and cleaning those little cylinders. Aw, the 1990s.
It was a weirdly satisfying experience.
Oh varied, proprietary interface standards how we haven't missed you
@thewestwardsky To think, we came SO close with USB...
Little bit of trivia for the 90s kids: The analog sticks on the Nintendo 64 controllers used optical encoders much in the same fashion as old ball mice meaning they were mostly digital as the encoders can only detect a set distance from the assumed center in so many exact increments. But by being able to detect so many small increments of movement, it essentially "emulated" true analog control as far as the end user was concerned. Probably the only thing that gives it away is the very subtle "ratcheting" feedback you can feel when rotating it, that's the plastic teeth on the encoder discs.
"What does a computer mouse see"
*Me laid down against my table and chair, using my crotch as a mouse pad*
"Huh."
*protogen noises*
@@coexist811 nice
...an unidentified object which appears to be an oblong rectangle, with a width of approximately 10 pixels...
I love how, since I'm studying electronics engineering, this is more or less like archaeology for me
4:30 You don't need a Gameboy camera for that. Phone cameras show infrared light as well. I tried it with the LED of my TV's remote controller.
You probably have an Android smartphone. All my friends' fruity smartphones I've tried that with have failed to see the IR light. I have a Samsung Galaxy S7 and it sees IR (as did the GS5 and GS2 I had before).
If you have a smartphone capable of seeing IR, that is one way to check the batteries in your TV remote. Pressing buttons: good batteries = blinking light, bad batteries (or faulty remote) = nothing.
I actually found the old rollerball mice a little more reliable, drives me nuts with optical that a single hair getting inside the case an infront of the laser will send it doolally.
And optical mouses don't work properly on many surface materials such as blank paper, which sucks
that is simply false, either you are using it on the wrong surface or you are using a old OLD mouse.
@@bonkybonk_ow2793 Hes right, an optical mouse wont work right on a surface thats highly reflective or lacks trackable features such as patternation or contrasting colours.
@@watcherzero5256 you can get a modern Logitech mx master with a darkfield sensor which can track even on glass
@@davelovell8631 Glass isnt that hard, it has a pretty rough texture when your looking at it at that scale.
Me: "What a great and interesting episode!"
8BG: "Stick around for the next episode, where I talk about the Mini-PET!"
Me: "AN 8BG CLIFFHANGER, WHYYYYYY"
Can confirm I tried to clean the ball of a mouse as a kid. Except I was dumb enough that I couldn't figure out how to put it back together, lmao
Until now I never realized that modern mice have cameras...
They probably have microphones too...
@@justbob8294 I wouldn't be surprised
@YOLO MAN It's not like there's a human on the other side listening, like in the movies. Your phone always listen to you, convert speech to text and send to cloud periodically, stored in your profile on the cloud at very little cost. The machines work 24/7, and the data actually generate profit for the company, so tell me why wouldn't they do it
@YOLO MAN its only a joke like geez
YOLO MAN i can tell that you must be SO fun at parties.
"let's take a look with a Gameboy camera" is the biggest power move I have ever witnessed
So cool. Hope you guys in texas are ok again. Hope to see more videos in the future! ;)
I remember back in school people would always steal the balls out of each mouse so they wouldn't work anymore.
@mark smith I'm married so that one hits home.
@mark smith lol
I'm impressed when he shown off his blocky Minecraft mouse
This is without any doubt the best channel on RUclips, under literally any aspect.
The 8-Bit Guy: Starts talking about breaking the code of the mouse and shows hundreds of code lines.
Me: "I like your funny words magic man."
*Mouse Inputs for Serial, Commodore, Amiga, Atari and Macintosh*
"Wait, it's all 9-Pin connectors!"
"Always has been."
@HyperBlu 263The Mega Drive/Genesis has no mouse.
@@arandomuser1723 huh.
gbc camera was a genius way to find the infra red, kudos to you for thinking of that
you have it backwards with the light diagrams, if the light picking up is the input. Movement downward would show light on the bottom pixel first, then the top, so so forth.
From what I can tell, you have the whole thing backward in terms of spatial reasoning. maybe Im wrong.
Ah, a proper gentleman knows how to clean his mouse's rollers and balls.
MY DIRTY MIND
Cock and Ball Clean-up
I also had a mouse with such a special pad for my XT PC, connected via serial port. At some point that pad was falling apart and I had no money to replace it. So what I did was simple: I printed a similar pattern as was on that pad using my 24 pin needle printer of that time on ordinary paper. Of course, I couldn't print as fine as the original pattern was but it was fine enough, the movement was just a bit slower. Finally I got a very thin, transparent piece of hard plastic as a cover and the replacement was done. While not good as the original, it kept that mouse alive and I could re-print it as often as needed. As you can see, my mouse was already a bit newer and did not work with two different kinds of light, it just required a pattern of tiny squares, circles, or octagons (I tried all three and all of them worked). When I got a new computer, I also went back to a mouse with a ball even though they got dirty, their movement was just smoother until the first real optical mice were available for affordable prices.
You get reminded of how old you are when you remember thinking nothing when taking out the mouseball to clean it.