All current and former Mighty Mouse-users’ lives are a lie.
TL;DR: the ticking sound when you scroll a Mighty Mouse? It's fake. It's produced by a mini speaker.
So, today, I was cleaning some Mighty Mice—I found out that a toothbrush can help free grime from the scroll ball and allow it to work properly again. With this method, I was able to get one stubborn Mighty Mouses' ball unstuck.
With another, however, nothing I was trying was working... so, I opened it up (which proved to be easy) and disassembled the whole ball mechanism. It was quite interesting, and I was able to totally clean the internals. (Only thing, however, is that the mouse is—as far as I can tell—impossible to re-assemble, as the squeeze-gesture buttons cannot be re-inserted once removed.)
While doing so, I noticed that there’s a miniature speaker on the PCB; and, whatever I did kinda broke the mouse's scroll mechanism: I cleaned it out, but I must have done something incorrect. (It was a lost cause anyway, given that I couldn't re-assemble the mouse—unless I could have maybe torn those buttons off and left them out.) Upon plugging it in while it was still disassembled, I heard a constant buzzing noise that sounded exactly like a Mighty Mouse ball being scrolled: I found out that the ball isn’t powered; rather, the ticking noise you hear when you scroll the ball—only when the mouse is plugged in, of course—is merely a sound effect played on a speaker!
TL;DR: the ticking sound when you scroll a Mighty Mouse? It's fake. It's produced by a mini speaker.
So, today, I was cleaning some Mighty Mice—I found out that a toothbrush can help free grime from the scroll ball and allow it to work properly again. With this method, I was able to get one stubborn Mighty Mouses' ball unstuck.
With another, however, nothing I was trying was working... so, I opened it up (which proved to be easy) and disassembled the whole ball mechanism. It was quite interesting, and I was able to totally clean the internals. (Only thing, however, is that the mouse is—as far as I can tell—impossible to re-assemble, as the squeeze-gesture buttons cannot be re-inserted once removed.)
While doing so, I noticed that there’s a miniature speaker on the PCB; and, whatever I did kinda broke the mouse's scroll mechanism: I cleaned it out, but I must have done something incorrect. (It was a lost cause anyway, given that I couldn't re-assemble the mouse—unless I could have maybe torn those buttons off and left them out.) Upon plugging it in while it was still disassembled, I heard a constant buzzing noise that sounded exactly like a Mighty Mouse ball being scrolled: I found out that the ball isn’t powered; rather, the ticking noise you hear when you scroll the ball—only when the mouse is plugged in, of course—is merely a sound effect played on a speaker!
