_____________.                /\                      __________.__                 
\____    /\_ |__   _______  __)/ ______               \______   \  |   ____   ____  
  /     /  | __ \ /  _ \  \/  / /  ___/                |    |  _/  |  /  _ \ / ___\ 
 /     /_  | \_\ (  <_> >    <  \___ \                 |    |   \  |_(  <_> ) /_/  >
/_______ \ |___  /\____/__/\_ \/____  >                |______  /____/\____/\___  / 
        \/     \/            \/     \/                        \/           /_____/
July 11th, 2017
[Amiga TANK mouse!]


Ah ha, the magnificient TANK mouse, this thing is ancient, it is probably older than a lot of you reading this, closing in on thirty years. It is even older than my Amiga is, as it was the standard for for the Amiga 500. I bought this bad boy in the late 90s because I thought it looked really cool, and I wanted that old school feel.

Unfortunately, the left button stopped working entirely last week. It sort of freaked me out because I had been fiddling with a joy stick, trying to get it to work right. I thought I might have shorted out something on the motherboard. After some more investigation, I found that it was indeed the mouse and a really easy fix.

[Mouse innards!, yeck]


Here I have the mouse opened, and you can see the two little micro switches, the one on the left is the one that is failing. I was able to get it to partially work, after fiddling around for a while, but it still requires a hard push on the button. Look how clean this thing is after decades of existing.

[desoldering]


The switch is soldered to the motherboard, so it required me to desolder it. Here I am using some desoldering braid to pick up the extra solder. It was actually pretty cool, and was not at all difficult.

[Mouse innards!, yeck]


This is what the circuit board looks like without the switch, I had purchased a new switch earlier, so I just plopped it in, and soldered it to the board.

[Mouse innards!, yeck]


This one has a brown button on it, but otherwise it is exactly the same. The mouse responds exactly like it did before, but left clicking is now louder. It is amazing how much noise such a little switch makes.

[My drawing, yeck]


Now I can get back to drawing, I really really really need the practice. Before I fixed the mouse, it was almost impossible to draw anything, because the switch would go in and out of operation. It now works perfectly, albeit a bit noiser :)

[TAC 2 JoyStick]


While the soldering station was out, I decided I would get my Joy Stick fixed as well, it has been flaking out since I got it, cleaning the innards has proven pointless.

[JoyStick innards!, yeck]


Here you can get a basic glimpse into the workings of the Joy Stick, it is a really simple design with no circuit board. You can see where I added a bit of tin foil to one of the buttons as well. I did that so I would not have to push down as hard to make a connection.

[A little fix to the JoyStick]


I think what the problem was, these little connectors are all loose. I just soldered them all together so they would maintain a connection, and it is working perfectly now.

[Amiga underside]


I also got a few screws for my Amiga, as I had lost the original ones a while ago. Since I had to turn it upside down, I figured I would take a snapshot of it. I love my amiga, even the underside. Look at that 1240 accelerator with a 32mb simm card, ooh ya, sexy beast it is!

[Mouse innards!, yeck]


And so that concludes today's blog. There was not as much to write about because it was pretty simple to fix everything, and the pictures tell most of the story. I took the above picture yesterday, if you look closely you may see the double rainbow.. and yes, it went all the way!

Originally, I had modified all of these images on the Amiga, but saving them as PNG actually resulted in them taking more diskspace, even with only being 256 colours. With the exception of the drawing I made, they are all just from my phone.
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