Rice Rocket Mouse

by Robert McCann and Brett Sawyer

So, Brett got this mouse as a mouse to use with his iBook, but it just wasn't kewl enough to actually haul it out of his bag to use. We get the brilliant (notice sarcastic overtones) idea to modify the mouse with some LED's. I say that sarcastically because getting this apart is worse then working on old pc's and ford station tarus wagons combined. Now we must all bow and worship at Brett's mad skillz with getting this thing apart. I don't have any pictures of getting it apart as this was done a couple of weeks before doing any soldering on it. Not to mention it would be too graphic (ie: WARNING: Parents strongly cautioned, extreeme blood and violence)

We went to our friendly Radio Shack (they love me there) and got a few various LED's. Being on a very tight budget (poor coledge students) we got 1 blue and two green. Our initial experementation led to this... It was kind of nifty, very multi colored, but just wasn't bright enough. The blue and red pretty much drown out the green, and well, we wanted more blue! As such, we never re-assembled this one, so I don't have any better pics of it. So we got on ebay and ordered up some (100) ultra bright blue LED's.

5 straight hours of soldering and a hour re-assembeling in the morning and we get the Rice Rocket Mouse. Now mind you, I'm not a big fan of Rice Rockets (if you don't know what I'm talking about visit www.ricecop.com and www.anti-rice.com) but they are flashy and so is this.

Here are a couple of more picture for you viewing pleasure. sorry I don't have any picture's of the actual guts of this one, but same basic consept. If your counting LED's there are 7. One is slightly hidden as it is replaces the red main one. And just for note, this is a fully functional mouse. the click works, amazingly enough, and so does the tracking. I really haven't used this one, but the blue one I have in my microsoft mouse works fine.