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Magic ADB Mouse (Apple Magic Mouse case mod)

I took the innards of an Apple Magic Mouse and stuffed them inside the case of an old Apple Desktop Bus Mouse.

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I saw [Elliot] from TheRetroFuture stuff a wireless mouse inside an ADB Mouse and wanted to do the same. I can't do without right-click and scrolling though, so I chose the Magic Mouse which has an array of capacitive touch sensors, giving it a neat multi-touch surface.

I used a heat gun to soften the glue that held the sensor flex PCB onto the inside of the plastic top part of the mouse.  The newish electronics fit like a glove inside the ~35 year old "snow white" beauty, after a decent amount of destructive hacking and carving.

Since the flex PCB covers the whole inside of the top cover, I had to get rid of the plastic pin that used to push on the clicking microswitch. I chose to simply superglue the switch onto the flex PCB, having the button rest on that 16-pin DIP on the main board. This makes it behave a bit like the Magic Mouse in that the whole front of the mouse behaves like a button, so clicking is not restricted to the little rectangle. 

Unfortunately this takes away a little of that nice tactile, clunky feeling of the ADB mouse, so I might come up with another solution in the future. Perhaps involving the switch from the ADB mouse, which is about 100 times louder 🥁🎳💥

For now though, I'm really happy with how it looks and performs and it'll definitely be my daily clicker.

Right-click and omni-directional scroll works wonderfully, but multi-finger gestures are a bit finicky to perform. They work pretty well on the surface where the Apple logo is though, so when I two-finger swipe between spaces I just move my hand back a bit. I'm sure that if I sanded the top cover a bit thinner and more even it would work even better, but I never utilised any more gestures before anyway so I won't bother with that.
Update: After some fiddling with BetterTouchTool, the 2-finger swipes are running smooth :)

Short demo vid: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q4xUupvek9o

  • 1 × Apple Magic Mouse
  • 1 × Apple Desktop Bus Mouse
  • 1 × Solder, superglue and some wire

  • Wireless charging

    Johannes03/23/2020 at 20:58 0 comments

    I took the coil, circuit and battery from an Artwizz module made for the MM and installed them in the mouse. A piece of plastic from a floppy disk covers the coil and the hole. The floppy wasn't quite as yellowed as the mouse, but close enough!

    I've also played around with the MM settings in BetterTouchTool, like ignore zones and pressure thresholds. Using the mouse now is much more intuitive, and honestly really pleasant!

    An unintended extra feature is setting the click pressure by twisting the torn off cable stump!

    Up next is to modify the wireless charger into something more... suiting.

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Andrew Cassidy wrote 04/04/2020 at 03:21 point

Nice! I did something similar with a random bluetooth mouse a while ago http://drewcassidy.me/2017/11/13/Apple-Mouse/

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Gandalf Greybeard wrote 04/01/2020 at 21:48 point

I love the stub of wire left! As if the mouse had just broken loose!

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Johannes wrote 04/03/2020 at 09:56 point

Thanks!

"I want to break free" by Queen is the soundtrack of this project :)

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