Fixing Wireless Mouse's Buttons

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Category: Laptop Hardware

Published on Monday, 23 September 2013 13:42

Written by Ben

Hits: 17648

as a result of being mobile some items tend to "fall" from your beg , hand , the coffee table you are sitting next to etc, my wireless mouse is no different, especially because it's a mouse.

Anyway , it fell on many floors more than once and gravity did its damage and soon the primary button which I use (left button - I'm a right handed) lost its flexibility until it stopped working. In addition , the middle CPI button which increases the mouse's movement sensitivity was faking it , and often got stuck inside its mounting hole.

After the main left button stopped working I realized I won't be able to use this mouse unless I use a different mouse or fix this one , and I like to trying fixing things , so naturally I chose the fixing option.

At first glance I didn't see any screw holes beneath the mouse , I figured they must be hidden somewhere because no way that the 2 main big parts of the mouse were just connected to each other by using curved plastic without any metal screws.

I took off the all 4 friction stickers and revealed 2 screw holes. After realizing only 2 screws hold this mouse intact I returned the other 2 friction stickers to their marked place beneath the mouse.

I unscrewed the 2 Phillips screws and had to use a bit of force to separate the 2 main parts of the mouse from one another  -  the top and the bottom part.

Spotting the problem with the button wasn't hard as I took a first look at the mouse's board. The actual button was stuck inside its mounting point with no movement whatsoever. I tried using a 1 mm flat screwdriver to release it without success, I only did more damage than benefit, and as a result the button was stuck even more deeply inside the button unit.

I used the same 1mm flat screwdriver to open the button unit by separating 2 overlapping plastic parts on top of one another. Opening the button unit was successful but as a result one of the overlapping plastic parts which holds the unit together got broken. Moreover , the metal spring (which doesn't really look like a traditional spring but acts like one) was about to be broken and wore off because of external damage caused by gravity.

I decided to open the right button unit to trying learning how it was originally assembled so I would be able to copy it and fix the left button. The plan was to learn how to rebuild the left button unit using the right unit as a model and scavenge the CPI button unit for parts to fix the left button unit (since I had no real use of the CPI button in the first place).

Opening the right button unit was a big mistake. Although opening it was done without any damage to the unit itself - reassembling it all together proved a disaster. The parts were too small for a human finger or even for a small metal clamp tool to handle not mentioning all 3 parts - the metal spring , the red button and the cover - had to be connected together in a dynamic way, a way only a machine can perform.

Luckily I had another wireless mouse that was unused because its USB Rx\Tx unit stopped working long ago. And since every mouse has uses a distinctive Rx\Tx unit - I couldn't replace it with a new unit.

I made 1+1 in my head and figured - what not using the unused mouse as an organ donor?

So I took a soldering gun , heated up the soldering points beneath the button units in the donor mouse and took  them out of the board.

It was a bit tricky making the units release at first but I soon figured that all I had to do was while heating the soldering units I had to push the conductive metal connectors towards the board's surface , which made the button unit slowly but gradually loose grip of the board, until eventually all I had to do was to use a metal clamps + a bit of force to get the unit completely out.

I did the same process with the original mouse. The entire procedure was done in stages:

First I took out the left button on the unused mouse  ,  took out the disassembled button from the original mouse and only then I soldered the functioning button on the original mouse's board. The same goes for the second right button was well.

After mounting the rest of the prices of the mouse together - it worked like charm!

Conclusion- keep your old mice nearby cause you'll never know what you'll need them

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