It’s pretty obvious that I haven’t been posting much lately. However, you couldn’t tell by looking at my traffic. It looks about the same it always does save for the times that I get a project of mine put on Digg.  How do I account for this? Simple.  I have lots* of linkbacks to my original projects. 

Whenever I do a new mod or hack or whatever, it usually (read: always) gets to the front page of Digg and thus, gets linked to from all over the planet.  I love those days.  However, on days like today, when I am more than a month removed from my last front pager, I still get between several hundred to a thousand unique visitors a day.  This traffic certainly is not from my mediocre amount of subscribers, it’s from all the linkbacks.  A quick browsing of my stat tracker and I can tell that 90% of my incoming traffic is not from the little link posts I make. No, they are coming for the projects and original articles. 

With this in mind, I am going to be changing the format of Zerosign slightly.  I am tired of making the link dump posts that do little more than make me feel better for publishing something once a day.  Instead, I am going to be spending that time working on some projects I have coming up. What does this mean practically? All orginal content, in the form of projects or articles, but fewer posts. I believe that this arrangement will work out best for all of us. I won’t spend time looking for some reblogged item to post, and you won’t have to read about the same item that you already saw on BoingBoing or Make.  I will be planning on putting out a quality original post once or twice a week (if people can wait a week for a normal podcast, then I hope they can wait a week for an original, thoughful post from an expert me). If however, you miss those short, fast, regurgitated posts that I used to make, I’m sure you can find those somewhere else.

I had previously mentioned that I seem to be stuck on my current project. As I have said, I would like to keep the actual project undisclosed for the time being but I would also like help from the internets if any have useful knowledge on the matter. All help received in the comments section or otherwise will be appreciated and noted if this project ever really gets completed.

The project that I previously mentioned is one involving a scroll wheel taken from an optical mouse. For this portion of the project, I simply need to determine how the scroll wheel recognizes the difference in the direction that the wheel is turned (scroll up or scroll down). I will then use this to produce different results with a circuit of my own. The following describes my current progress and the area that I am stuck on.

I have desoldered the scroll wheel’s hardware from the circuit board and have been analyzing the outputs of the device’s three separate terminals with a multimeter to determine how the scroll wheel device recognizes which way the wheel is turned. I have observed that everyother ‘click’ (referring to a notch in the rotation) is a shorted connection between all three of the terminals, while the other notches contain a resistance value that seems to change each time I rotate another notch, no matter which way I rotate it. I have looked for some type of pattern in these varying resistance values but so far, have not found one.

Anyone know what’s going on here?

While alot of this site is dedicated toward posting new and interesting technologies, the core of Zerosign is about making things.  Whether it’s a new hardware hack or a simple application tweak, I really enjoy making and modifying software, gadgets and the like. However, there are times when I just hit a wall. I’ve been working on a project now for a few weeks, and I just cannot seem to figure out how to move on to the next step. I’d like to keep the details of my project vague, but let’s just say that in the process of reverse engineering something, you are suppose to figure out how all the components that you want to exploit function.  In this particular case, I have spent several hours examining the device and frankly am no closer to learning how exactly this device works on the hardware level. From here I can only see two options.

1)Press on.  Keep playing and experimenting with the device until finally something will ‘click’.

2)Move on.  Place the project aside and begin working on something else. 

Honestly, I have tried to do the latter, but I have put so much time into this project I just can’t seem to let it go. 

Now I want to use a lifeline and “Ask the Audience”. What do you do if you have reached the end of your ideas and still are no closer in completing your project, whatever it may be?  Also, if anyone has any advanced knowledge of the hardware side of mouse scroll wheels, I’d love to chat with you.