Building the Perfect Gaming Mouse

There are few terms that inspire more fury than “planned obsolescence.” Even when we can’t prove that a company purposefully engineered a product to fail over time, it sure seems like reliability and durability are often very low priorities. Computer mice certainly fall into this category and many of us have resigned ourselves to a life of new mice purchases every couple of years. But Alexander Nadeau (AKA Wareya) refused to accept that and instead designed his own perfect gaming mouse.

Like many gamers who make heavy use of their mice, Nadeau found that button failure was always inevitable. It didn’t seem to make a difference what brand he bought or how much spent; he could expect the buttons to fail within a year or two (or sometimes just months). He would usually replace the button switches, but got tired of going through that process over and over. His new DIY mouse has more robust buttons that should hold up to several years of frequent gaming.

This mouse has a custom PCB that contains the buttons, the sensor, and the controller. Nadeau wired the switches for better debouncing by utilizing both the NO (normally open) and NC (normally closed) pins. That eliminates the noisy chatter that tends to cause premature issues with typical mice. As a bonus, this wiring removes all latency common to standard debouncing algorithms. He paired those switches with a Pixart PMW3360 sensor, which is the same sensor you’ll find in many quality gaming mice. DPI is configurable in firmware, but is set to 1200 by default. A Raspberry Pi RP2040 microcontroller provides a USB HID connection to any PC.

Nadeau's PCB fits inside a custom modeled and 3D-printed shell. It is a pretty conventional design and looks nice. The firmware, which is open-source like the rest of the mouse, allows for customization like rebinding and macros, acceleration control, smoothing, and more — if you have the coding skill (Nadeau plans to streamline this in the future). Users can even access the unused pins of the RP2040 if they want to add mods, like LED lighting or more buttons.

Some people are willing to buy a new mouse every year. But for the people who aren’t, Nadeau's DIY gaming mouse seems like a good solution.