Two Mice - ignoring one in the OS

Misc
Matthew McCabe's icon

Matthew McCabe

Hi all,

I have a student who wants to use a trackball to control a patch in Max. This puts us in a situation where we want one USB mouse to actually be a mouse, and a second one (the trackball) to be ignored by the OS but still have the data delivered to Max via the "hi" object.

Has anyone successfully done this? I was considering using a teensy to remap, but then I found Karabiner Elements - but it doesn't seem to be able to filter and reassign mouse X/Y movement, only the buttons. It can block the mouse X/Y completely, but you can't reassign.

thanks for the help!

-matt

TFL's icon

TFL

A wild guess and workaround: I would assume the last pluged-in mouse taking control over the OS pointer, so what about:

  • unplug both mouse and trackball

  • plug the trackball in, connect to Max

  • plug the mouse in, which now should control the pointer

Not sure if it works at all, and not really doable with a laptop trackpad, just a wild guess.

Matthew McCabe's icon

Matthew McCabe

That might be doable on Windows, but on a Mac, all connected mice control the pointer, regardless of the order they are plugged in. It seems like the "hi" object gets the data after it's been delivered to IOKit, and not before. I might have to build a hardware solution.

TFL's icon

TFL

Last update is from about a year ago but this is worth trying. It's meant to assign mouses to specific monitors (when using multiple monitors), but looking at the screenshot you can apparently "disable" a mouse from controlling the pointer. Hopefully it still makes it accessible from [hi].