Mouse / Trackball Suggestions

Well, my beloved Logi M575 Trackball mouse decided to take a dive off the table last night, I sure the cat was involved. Anyway, after a quick dissection a broken micro switch was found and now it sits in the retirement bin.

I’m looking for a replacement device and was wondering what folks are using. Any suggestions, good or bad?

I use a Logitech G600 by preference (don’t like the bother of yet another battery, so preferred wired), but was quite taken aback when I saw how much they are selling for these days… (makes me glad I bought a spare).

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@WillAdams Can those buttons be programed to act as a jogging control with Carbide Motion?

Yes, if one uses the software, but I haven’t tried that (I’d be concerned about getting confused by the layout, and it’s not like the area around m machines is suited to a mouse…) — I used to use them for various keyboard shortcuts for InDesign back when I did book and journal composition.

For trackballs, anything by elecom is excellent (I use the huge as a daily driver)
The Logitech mx ergo seems to be the spiritual successor to your m575?
Kensington also makes some nice ones, the scroll rings in particular are very well done.

Or you can go a little off the rails and check out the ploopy folks. They have the benefit of being fully repairable and running open source firmware…the world is your oyster if you’ve got the time to dedicate :stuck_out_tongue_winking_eye:

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Oooh, ploopy has a new one out that may be interesting given the many buttons: Adept Trackball – Ploopy

I might end up picking one up when I move the cnc into a new home in the coming weeks…kvm isn’t going to work across floors :smiling_face_with_tear:

Edit: AND integrated via. A super simple web interface for customizing your firmware. No more spending hours editing firmware and praying it works. They’ve really polished their products since I last checked them out.

If your not afraid of sticker shock look at 3Dconnexion US - SpaceMouse, CadMouse, Keyboard, Drivers

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Or if you’re not afraid to dive down a deep, convoluted rabbit hole search “space mouse” on Printables (says the guy who has Hall-effect joysticks and circuit boards from England on order… :slight_smile: )

I did buy a Spacemouse (the wired compact model) a while back, since my son reported good success with the one he got for Christmas one year.

It works wonderfully in OpenSCAD/PythonSCAD w/o any drivers, and I need to look into installing the drivers to make it work in Alibre Atom 3D (and of course, if we could work out some sort of option for something along these lines in Carbide Create that would be huge).

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Thanks for the comments all. I ended up with a new Logi M575S only because its simple and what I’m used to using.

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For jogging control i got one of these a while ago and i love it.

https://www.etsy.com/listing/1726484984/shapeokonomad-jog-control-carbide-motion?ref=yr_purchases

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