What tilt wheels do (was Re: Bull***! )

From: Last2Know (grokkalot_at_yahoo.com)
Date: 09/14/04 

Date: Mon, 13 Sep 2004 21:02:37 -0500

>> Keep in mind that he also has access to the SOURCE CODE
>> for about 8 varieties of mice. The real question is whether
>> the Tilt Wheel mouse follows any traditional mouse protocol.
>
> From what I've read, everything already works except the "tilt"
> part of it: it already functions fine as a non-tilt wheel
> mouse.
>
>> It took a about 20 hours to add scroll-wheel support, once the
>> protocol was actually documented.
>>
>> I would guess that you are probably right though. It might take
>> **someone** around 40-80 hours to properly implement all of the
>> features of the tilt-wheel mouse for Linux.
>
> Could be. 8-16 was just an initial guess based on the
> assumption that the protocol was already documented and the
> existing driver worked except for the "tilt" part.

That's a reasonable thought. FWIW though, I guess it is
a bigger project, the reason being that apparently the
horizontal tilt of the wheel is supposed to be interpreted
as an extra wheel
(c.f.http://www.extremetech.com/article2/0,1558,1241298,00.asp )

That's conceptually simple, but looks to involve expanding
the kernel's concept of what a mouse signal can be to include
two wheels instead of one, therebye touching a lot of files.
I'm guessing that is one reason why nobody got around to it.

Quantcast