Adding Gaming Features to a Mouse

Hey, in this instructable I hope to help you add some cool gaming features to your mouse, we will do this by moving the middle click button to a more convenient location (near the thumb) and then also making it act as a quick-fire button, adding new internal buttons to make the mouse click nicer, adding weight to help with first person shooters and adding an ergonomic thumbs rest.

We will start by swapping the built-in buttons with new ones now this doesn't make a huge difference to the way your mouse feels but you can defiantly tell the difference while clicking.The ones that came in my mouse are very resistive and aren't easy to click, so I grabbed my old broken mouse and desoldered the buttons I really liked and put them aside, next we need to desolder the new mouse's buttons, do this very carefully as you don't want to damage your mouse, lastly we just resolder the old mouse's buttons to the new mouse's circuit board and plug it in to make sure nothing went wrong. ( make sure you solder it down straight or the click mechanism won't engage properly.) Dont have an old mouse to salvage? No problem! Get really nice buttons from amazon : https://goo.gl/kC96Ft

In my experience adding weights only makes a huge difference in first person shooters but you may find them useful in other games. Now my old broken mouse had weights I could salvage however you could you pretty much anything as a weight as long as it fits inside and you can secure it down (coins, magnets, ball bearings). When putting your weights in make sure you distribute the weight properly either put a weight on each side or put them all as close as you can to the middle I also found playing around with different combinations really helpful finding the perfect weight but this will differ with every person so just play around with different amount :D.

When playing I use the middle click as my voice communication button however its in a very inconvenient place so we will wire another button connected to the middle mouse button and place it on the side of our mouse so it can be pushed by our thumb. Start by looking for the middle mouse button it's normally under the scroll wheel and solder two wires to both terminals next cut a hole on the side where the button will be and run bot the wires there, glue the button down and solder both the wires to it. You can extend any button and put it anywhere on the mouse however I chose to use my old mouses thumb rest which has a built in button that I wired to my middle mouse button.

I really enjoy a thumb rest when I play games so I tried many different options for making my own thumb rest, unfortunately I found that using my old mouses thumb rest was the best option however I found that the 3d printed thumb rest worked very well and so did protoplastic one. If you don't have an old mouse you can salvage I would really recommend making the thumb rest out of protoplastic as you can mold it to your finger really easily. Now when making the thumb rest make sure you leave spaces for a button to use as your middle click . Once you have made your thumb rest figure out where it will go on the mouse and cut a small hole for the middle click button wires to come through now solder them to our new button on the thumb rest and glue it in place.

Now I know I have used a lot of parts from my old mouse and not everyone has one to salvage but even if you don't I do really recommend buying some of the parts to upgrade your mouse.

Mouse Buttons: https://goo.gl/kC96Ft

Mouse Weights: https://goo.gl/Rd9Vad (or just use some coins :D)

Thumbrest: https://goo.gl/Z5kh9U (or 3d print it)

Thanks for reading please leave any questions you may have below and I will do my best to reply to you.