On my desk currently are the Kensington Expert Mouse and a Logitech M570. I'm rather unimpressed with both for multiple reasons, and through design iteration have found that my design most closely resembles the discontinued Microsoft Trackball Explorer, although mine has a larger ball and a different scrollwheel, as well as a different switch mechanism for the two pairs of buttons.

My goal is to make one that allows you access to all the buttons without moving your hand, which is a major problem with the Expert Mouse, as well as giving the precision of a large trackball-- which I feel is easiest to achieve with an index-finger controlled trackball. I also want to make it ergonomic, since the Expert Mouse seriously lacks in that front and I still get wrist strain using it.

I think it's a fairly sizeable untapped market and have a lot of faith in this design, assuming I can convince a manufacturer to make it. I'm pretty well along with my first generation of prototypes-- just waiting on Davis's 3d scanners to open up for the month so I can get my clay model digitized.

Hi!

I'm a senior undergraduate mechanical engineer at UC Davis...hoping to graduate in a quarter or two. I'm currently working on making a trackball that doesn't suck for gaming, and in my spare time I work on unraveling the development tools behind Counter-Strike: GO in the hopes of making a neat map. I'm also an active member of the bay area furry community, so feel free to ask me about that. My character is a pangolin-dragon.

This community kinda reminds me of pre- "web 2.0" internet and I'm really digging that. I might stick around for a bit...I'm also interested in the comment system that seems to be time-weighted as well as vote-weighted, or something. It's interesting and makes me feel like contributing; I always feel like I'm shouting into a hole when I post on a reddit post.