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Lobotomouse™: Serial mouse to quadrature decoder

I have an AT&T 5620 DMD terminal, which is an intelligent graphics terminal based on the AT&T Bellmac 32 processor. Unfortunately I didn't get a mouse with it. It simply needs two pairs of quadrature signals and three switch inputs for the buttons. In the early days of mice, this was a typical mouse interface but now most mice have either serial, PS/2, or ADB interfaces. I don't have any spare unencoded mice around. I could have gutted a serial mouse, but I decided that the best thing to do was to use a PIC16C54 as a mouse decoder so that I can use any serial mouse that's handy.

This project was somewhat ironic in that many mice use a PIC internally as an encoder.

Serial mouse sources:

New serial mice are now relatively hard to find, but are still useful for older systems that don't have PS/2 or USB ports. A Serial Mouse is available from HardwareCooling.com, a sponsor of this web page.

Last updated August 25, 2005

eric@brouhaha.com


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