Inside a Mouse

The main goal of any mouse is to translate the

motion of your hand into signals that the
computer can use. Almost all mice today do the
translation using five components:

1. A ball inside the mouse touches the

desktop and rolls when the mouse moves.
1.

The underside of the mouse's logic

board: The exposed portion of the
ball touches the desktop

2. Two rollers inside the mouse touch the ball. One of the rollers is oriented
so that it detects motion in the X direction, and the other is oriented 90
degrees to the first roller so it detects motion in the Y direction. When the
ball rotates,
one or both of these rollers rotate as well. The following image
1.
shows the two white rollers on this mouse:

The rollers that touch

the ball and detect X
and Y motion

3. The rollers each connect to a shaft, and the shaft spins a disk with holes in
it. When a roller rolls, its shaft and disk spin. The following image shows the
disk:

typical optical
encoding disk: This
disk has 36 holes
around its outer
edge.

4. On either side of the disk there is an infrared LED and an infrared

sensor. The holes in the disk break the beam of light coming from the LED
so that the infrared sensor sees pulses of light. The rate of the pulsing is
directly related to the speed of the mouse and the distance it travels.

closeup of one
of the optical
encoders that
track mouse
motion: There is
an infrared LED
(clear) on one
side of the disk
and an infrared
sensor (red) on
the other.

5. An on-board processor chip reads the pulses from the

infrared sensors and turns them into binary data that the
computer can understand. The chip sends the binary data to
the computer through the mouse's cord.

The logic section of a

mouse is dominated by
an encoder chip, a small
processor that reads the
pulses coming from the
infrared sensors and
turns them into bytes
sent to the computer.
You can also see the
two buttons that detect
clicks (on either side of
the wire
connector

In this optomechanical arrangement, the disk moves

mechanically, and an optical system counts pulses of light. On
this mouse, the ball is 21 mm in diameter. The roller is 7 mm
in diameter. The encoding disk has 36 holes. So if the mouse
moves 25.4 mm (1 inch), the encoder chip detects 41 pulses
of light.

You might have noticed that each encoder disk has two infrared LEDs and two
infrared sensors, one on each side of the disk (so there are four LED/sensor
pairs inside a mouse). This arrangement allows the processor to detect the
disk's direction of rotation. There is a piece of plastic with a small, precisely
located hole that sits between the encoder disk and each infrared sensor. It is
visible in this photo:

A close-up of one of the

optical encoders that
track mouse motion:
Note the piece of plastic
between the infrared
sensor (red) and the
encoding disk.

This piece of plastic provides a window through which the infrared sensor
can "see." The window on one side of the disk is located slightly higher
than it is on the other -- one-half the height of one of the holes in the
encoder disk, to be exact. That difference causes the two infrared sensors
to see pulses of light at slightly different times. There are times when one of
the sensors will see a pulse of light when the other does not, and vice
versa. This page offers a nice explanation of how direction is determined.

The Optical Mouse

With advances it mouse technology, it appears that the venerable
wheeled mouse is in danger of extinction. The now-preferred
device for pointing and clicking is the optical mouse.

Developed by Agilent Technologies and introduced to the world in late 1999, the optical
mouse actually uses a tiny camera to take 1,500 pictures every second.

Able to work on almost any surface, the mouse has a small, red light-emitting
diode (LED) that bounces light off that surface onto a complimentary metaloxide semiconductor (CMOS) sensor. The CMOS sensor sends each image to
a digital signal processor (DSP) for analysis. The DSP, operating at 18 MIPS
(million instructions per second), is able to detect patterns in the images and
see how those patterns have moved since the previous image. Based on the
change in patterns over a sequence of images, the DSP determines how far the
mouse has moved and sends the corresponding coordinates to the computer.
The computer moves the cursor on the screen based on the coordinates
received from the mouse. This happens hundreds of times each second,
making the cursor appear to move very smoothly.

In this photo, you can see

the LED on the bottom of
the mouse.

Optical mice have several benefits over wheeled mice:

No moving parts means less wear and a lower chance of failure.
There's no way for dirt to get inside the mouse and interfere with the
tracking sensors.
Increased tracking resolution means smoother response.
They don't require a special surface, such as a mouse pad.

Apple has transformed its

optical mouse into a
modern work of art.

Although LED-based optical mice are fairly recent, another type of optical
mouse has been around for over a decade. The original optical-mouse
technology bounced a focused beam of light off a highly-reflective mouse
pad onto a sensor. The mouse pad had a grid of dark lines. Each time the
mouse was moved, the beam of light was interrupted by the grid. Whenever
the light was interrupted, the sensor sent a signal to the computer and the
cursor moved a corresponding amount.
This kind of optical mouse was difficult to use, requiring that you hold it at
precisely the right angle to ensure that the light beam and sensor aligned.
Also, damage to or loss of the mouse pad rendered the mouse useless
until a replacement pad was purchased. Today's LED-based optical mice
are far more user-friendly and reliable.

Data Interface
Most mice in use today use the standard PS/2 type
connector, as shown here:

A typical PS/2 connector: Assume that pin 1 is located just

to the left of the black alignment pin, and the others are
numbered clockwise from there.

These pins have the following functions (refer to the above photo for pin numbering):
1.Unused
2.+5 volts (to power the chip and LEDs)
3.Unused
4.Clock
5.Ground
6.Data

What Data is Sent

Whenever the mouse moves or the user clicks a button, the mouse sends 3 bytes of
data to the computer. The first byte's 8 bits contain:
1.

Left button state (0 = off, 1 = on)

2.

Right button state (0 = off, 1 = on)

3.

4.

5.

X direction (positive or negative)

6.

Y direction

7.

X overflow (the mouse moved more than 255 pulses in 1/40th of a second)

8.

Y overflow

The next 2 bytes contain the X and Y movement values, respectively. These 2 bytes
contain the number of pulses that have been detected in the X and Y direction since
the last packet was sent.

The data is sent from the mouse to the computer serially on the data line, with the
clock line pulsing to tell the computer where each bit starts and stops. Eleven bits
are sent for each byte (1 start bit, 8 data bits, 1 parity bit and 1 stop bit). The PS/2
mouse sends on the order of 1,200 bits per second. That allows it to report mouse
position to the computer at a maximum rate of about 40 reports per second. If you
are moving the mouse very rapidly, the mouse may travel an inch or more in onefortieth of a second. This is why there is a byte allocated for X and Y motion in the
data protocol.

Some mice use serial or USB type connectors. See How Serial Ports
Work and How USB Ports Work for information on these technologies.