Want to use a classic Mac mouse on a modern computer? Nope? Here's how to do it anyway
Need to hook up a classic Mac mouse to your modern machine using a DIY USB adapter? [John Floren] has you covered. [John's] solution uses a board with an ATmega32U4 microcontroller to connect to the Mac mouse on one side and emulate a USB HID (Human Interface Device) on the other. A modern machine therefore recognizes it like any other USB input device.
Why is this necessary? The classic Mac mouse connector may look like a familiar DE-9 connector, but it is not an RS-232 device and would not work if plugged into a 9-pin serial port. The classic Mac mouse uses a different pinout and doesn't have much for the brain inside. It relies on the host computer to directly read its encoders and button states.
This project is actually a bit of an update to earlier work that [John] did to make a vintage Depraz mouse work with modern systems. He suspected it wouldn't take much to make it work with a regular Mac mouse as well, and he was right - just updated the pin connections and added pull-up resistors. Source code and design files are on GitHub.
Even if you don't particularly want to use a regular Mac mouse for day-to-day work, there's certainly value in this sort of thing for those who deal with vintage hardware: it helps verify operation old peripherals without having to turn on a vintage machine.
Need to hook up a classic Mac mouse to your modern machine using a DIY USB adapter? [John Floren] has you covered. [John's] solution uses a board with an ATmega32U4 microcontroller to connect to the Mac mouse on one side and emulate a USB HID (Human Interface Device) on the other. A modern machine therefore recognizes it like any other USB input device.
Why is this necessary? The classic Mac mouse connector may look like a familiar DE-9 connector, but it is not an RS-232 device and would not work if plugged into a 9-pin serial port. The classic Mac mouse uses a different pinout and doesn't have much for the brain inside. It relies on the host computer to directly read its encoders and button states.
This project is actually a bit of an update to earlier work that [John] did to make a vintage Depraz mouse work with modern systems. He suspected it wouldn't take much to make it work with a regular Mac mouse as well, and he was right - just updated the pin connections and added pull-up resistors. Source code and design files are on GitHub.
Even if you don't particularly want to use a regular Mac mouse for day-to-day work, there's certainly value in this sort of thing for those who deal with vintage hardware: it helps verify operation old peripherals without having to turn on a vintage machine.
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