Happ Trackball Acting Spastically

[Creebo]

I'm working on a cabinet and I did the hack to interface the rotary encoders (if you want to call them that) in the trackball with a PS/2 ball mouse. It was working fine until today, which just happened to be the same day I got the rest of the buttons working . Now it seems my Y axis has a bit of a stutter to it. There's nothing wrong with my rollers, I just cleaned them, and the mouse was working before I hacked it up.

Has anyone else had this issue? I've been at it for hours :\

[Snow_Cat]

Is there any dirt or grease caught in your encoder wheel?

Is the wiring still good?

[Creebo]

The wiring is fine, and the internals are clean. The trackball works fine when closed up, but as soon as I mount it in the cabinet, only the Y axis stops working. I resoldered all the joints and replaced the wiring, but no luck so far. I've also insulated the board and taped it to the case of the trackball to protect against shorting and stress on the wires, but it just doesn't want to work when it's mounted.

[tom61]

My guess is that either the encoder wheel is getting locked from moving by pressure, or that possibly ground is messed up on the entire panel and that one axis is grounded to chassis or a screw causing it to not register properly.

Pictures of the insides of it and the mount to panel may help.

[Creebo]

I gave up on the trackball for a while, but then decided to buy a Optiwiz to remove the possibility of a bad mouse. I hooked everything up, and the Y axis was working better, yet still a bit spastic, and the X axis doesn't seem to work at all. I busted out a digital oscope I forgot that I had built a couple years back and used it to diagnose the optics. I get no response from the X axis, so I figure I did a crap job wiring it, or there's a bad trace on the optic board. The Y axis looks good, but I get this weird drop off point (I don't know what you call it, I'm not very oscope savvy) and that's where I think I might be having some of my problems.

Although, I took the rollers/encoders out of the case and tested each on the working Y axis optic board. The one that was already being used for the Y axis tested fine. Motion was smooth and precise. So I think I just need to clean the rollers with some brasso, and maybe clean the wheel a little with some dish soap. The X axis roller/encoder, however, worked about half of the time. None of the slits are damaged, so I'm thinking it's another cleaning issue. But like I said before, the optics on the X axis are nonresponsive to anything, therefore this is just another problem.

Ugh, this thing has proved to be the most difficult project in the whole cabinet. Well, I guess the bright side of this is if I don't get the X axis working, I could always turn the Y axis into a spinner!