Magnets. Yup, magnets. If any of you have pulled out your trackball, if you look at the bottom of the housing of it, there are 4 rollers, each roller has a magnet at the end, and there are 4 IC's on the Pearls board that react to the magnet being rolled. Now technologically, I think this design is quite cool, but in terms of durability and maintenance it sucks! My trackball will barley move left or right or up or down and I can't fix it because it's all controlled by magnets. The only thing I'm thinking that I will try soon is to try to re-magnetize the rollers on the trackball using a large magnet and see if that helps because it's really annoying when trying to use the menu's and such.
I happened to have an assembly from a repair, and indeed it does have relatively strong magnets on it. My question to you, is if it was in the unit, how did you manage to demagnetize the rollers. It would require quite a bit of opposite magnetization to do that. Also, if you are going to repair it you might want to find out if the magnets are all the same polarization or not. Did you clean out the are where the IC's are, I would think you would have more of a problem from dirt being stuck in there and blocking the magnets than them being demagnetized.
Yea you're right, I was mistaken...theres no way I demagnitized anything in there. The problem is the ball isn't making enough contact with the rollers for some reason and I can't figure out why, almost like the rollers are too thin. I need to coat them with a small piece of thin tape or something for it to 'thicken' the rollers and make better contact. I hope this will fix the problem because I highly doubt theres anything wrong with the IC's, and if there is then it really is a crappy design.
So how does the trackball work? I'll tell ya...
