20240217 That yellow mouse button

The Scroll button

 In the early years of computing, people were contend with two buttons on their mouse. It was so useful, that they named it the left and right mouse button. This was all well and dandy, I suppose until the mouse for southpaws were created. Imagine the left and right mouse button on the your right hand becoming right and left mouse button on the left hand.

 And by the early 90's, with the infancy of the Internet, some bright spark thought it was fun to create long Webpages and pages and pages of documents. Imagine the amount of potential RSI injuries. So, in the mid-90's KYE Systems from Taiwan introduced the scrolling wheel and strategically placed them between the two mouse buttons. This new feature did not catch on until Microsoft picked it up and also featured them in Microsoft Office 97.

 And all of a sudden, we could not live without it.

 

The Lifetime of a Mouse

 Any mouse, or rather, any mouse that I love to use, would have a longer lifespan than the ones I threw away. The more I use them, the more I would grow attached to it, so much so that if it fails, I would try to repair them. I use my mouse daily and if there were a software which can count the times I clicked on the buttons, it would go into the hundreds. And so, this is the time where the buttons would be affected mechanically, either from plastic fatique or worn out buttons. For today, it is the scroll wheel button which is faulty.

 Once you start to use software that needs the scroll button, this is the end result. The CAD software like SketchUp, EaglePCB and even Inkscape tend to make use of that as often as one uses the left mouse button.

 

My tweezers are holding the shorter 6mm x 6mm x 4.3mm silent mouse buttons. Each button colour, from different manufacturer, has a certain lifespan. In this case, the supposedly Kailh red buttons has a 5 million click lifespan compared to yellow's 8 million. But I am not going to hold the seller to that since I have no idea if this is original.
I am going to replace the yellow scroll button (middle) with a red version since this was the only button I could get without having to buy lots.

The big blob of solder is hard to remove and due to age, the lead seems to have some issues with the soldering iron. I had to feed it with extra lead and once it is molten, I use the de-soldering pump.

Yeeeaahh... red and yellow buttons does not make any difference to me right now.
Millions of clicks? Just de-solder and solder a new one in its place.