Inspired by Commodore's Classic "Tank Mouse," Lion McLionhead Aims to Make "The Perfect Mouse"
Providing, that is, your idea of perfection extends to boxy chassis evoking the 1980s industrial design aesthetic.
Pseudonymous maker "Lion McLionhead" is on a quest to build "the perfect mouse" — which apparently means a throwback to the 1980s and the days of Commodore's blocky "Tank Mouse" of Amiga fame, only with a scroll wheel and a rear-mounted "tail" cable.
"It's surprising just how bad modern mice feel," McLionhead claims. "Even the maligned Commodore 1351 was better than what we have now. Mice peaked with the 'grey eye' Microsoft Mouse. Lions had the Microsoft Mouse before they had the Commodore. The Commodore was bad but still gave [the] tactile sensation of a button click. What's been [missing] is a boxy design from the mid '80s, with assertive buttons and wheel clicks."
Commodore's 1351 launched in 1986 as an accessory for the Commodore 64 and 128 family of eight-bit computers, but its design will be familiar to a broader audience as the "Tank Mouse" provided with the Commodore Amiga range — the name taken from its boxy, angular design. Where the Commmodore 1351 was a two-button mouse, though, McLionhead's spiritual successor extends to a scroll wheel that doubles as a middle button.
A work-in-progress, the unnamed prototype mouse uses a 3D-printed chassis that manages to be even more boxy than Commodore's best effort to house an optical mouse board whose sensor shines through the underside. There are left and right buttons, like on the Commodore 1351, using clicky keyboard switches — with another tactile microswitch serving as the middle-click for the wheel. Unusually, the cable doesn't exit out of the top of the mouse but the bottom — making for a more murine mouse, with a "tail" a the opposite end to its button "ears."
"The camera seems to be far sighted or sensitive to ambient light," McLionhead writes of experiments with the initial prototype. "The wheel needs to held lower or it can't detect rotation. It takes some getting used to the buttons this far forward of the wheel. The more assertive buttons are definitely more pleasing but they take getting used to. Still pondering ways to extend the caps behind the wheel without losing the direct connection to the buttons."
You can follow the project on its Hackaday.io page; design files had not been released at the time of writing.