- Joined
- Sep 13, 2011
I'm new here, so like any newcomer I am full of questions and am in need of guidance. I have alot of experience doing the most basic form of building a rig, but little else outside of simply buying all the components and putting them inside in a case. I've done cosmetic related things, but never any hardcore wiring or soldering. For my current project, I want to do a few things to my new Roccat Pyra mouse, namely changing out the LED which is housed the shell, possibly changing the sensor color, and tweaking the scrollwheel. This will be a long post, so here we go.
After looking for a new mouse, I finally decided on the Roccat Pyra. I personally prefer small "mobile" sized mice, and I really love the shape and look of the mouse itself. I go for stealthy, techy, angular looking stuff in literally everything I own, so a mouse that looks like a Lamborghini is perfect. The only problem with it is: everything is blue.
Roccat is pretty much unknown to the USA. The company seems to be very popular in Europe, but they have no US support or sales available. Even going to their site to pick a locale, none of the Americas are even on the list. So It's no surprise that getting ahold of their gear is very difficult and expensive to say the least, with steep import and shipping prices and taxes you'll have to pony up if you want to get it in the US. Recently, Amazon started stocking some of their stuff, and that's how I was able to get the Pyra without paying a $30 markup.
All of Roccat's hardware has the same theme; a black and blue color scheme. Which works great for alot of people, I'm sure! But not for me. My current rig is all black and orange (NZXT Vulcan) and I want all of my perhiperals to also be black and orange to match. And before anyone asks, yes I'm one of those people who's psychotically driven to make everything match perfectly at any cost because it's important to me.
So onto the mouse's LED.
All of the Roccat mice have some level of LED lighting to them. The larger mice have multi color LED's in them which allow you to change their color. Awesome, I thought. What about that cool little mobile one? Nope. No color change ability. The tiny Pyra does not have any such option and only has a single bright blue LED housed inside the mouse that shines through a slit between the mouse buttons. it's exceptionally bright, and at all times does this pulsating/throbbing on/off breathing type thing.
This wouldn't be so bad if there was an option to turn it off, but there is none. It does this constantly. It is a nuisance. There is no setting or option to make it stop doing this and it's driving me up the wall. I was considering just opening the mouse up and ripping it out, but I have found no way to open this mouse up. I can only assume there are screws hidden under the slider feet, but I haven't tried pulling it apart yet.
For this specific LED, the goal is to replace the blue LED with an orange LED; and if at all possible, to have it stay lit perpetually and steady without doing the throbbing light thing. I know I will probably have to completely rip this mouse apart to do this, and that's fine, especially if anyone could suggest what to do, like solder this or that, or if someone might need a close up pic of the pcb in there to suggest what to do.
Now for the next issue, the blue sensor on the bottom.
As soon as this mouse touched my mousepad, it didn't do anything. I thought something was wrong, but it works perfectly. It just doesn't track against blue things. And that happens to be a glaring problem that I'm surprised no one has mentioned. The mousepad in question that I used on it first was a Windows Vista orb mousepad that I got ahold of from a dev kit promo box from beta testing Vista while it was in Release Candidate status. They are pretty rare, so I don't expect many people to know what I'm talking about, but just imagine the standard Vista orb logo, but on a plastic top mousepad.
Now, it is to my understanding that all of these newer "blu track" type mice have superior imaging abilities. The mouse itself is a 1600 dpi mouse with a 1000hz polling rate. Sounds pretty good, right? Well why can't it track on the color blue?! I've had to pull out an old junky cloth topped mousepad just so I can use this thing, because of all the blue in the Windows orb graphic that it skips over. I want this blue sensor out of this mouse immediately, and a nice red one in there instead. What's worse (besides having to go find a new mousepad) is that the blue sensor is so bright, the light seeps out of the bottom of the mouse, ruining my whole black and orange thing I have going on here.
So how do you go about doing this? I've read that you can't just change out the sensor part, and apparently you'd have to replace literally all of the chips and everything. Seems like alot of work just to make the sensor color be different. So what's actually giving the sensor it's color? Can you just change the lens or whatever's in there? What about putting some kind of clear paint over it? Transparent colored plastic? There has to be a way around this.
And for the final complaint/mod
This mouse has a tilt wheel for mouse3. It is incredibly stiff, incredibly loud, and takes an incredible amount of pressure to actually click in/over. Is there a way to soften this up or dampen the sound? I'm not kidding, it really goes KER-CHUNK when you press it in. For all the points this mouse wins with looks, style, and comfort, alot of it is ruined with this mousewheel. Maybe I just got a weird one out of the batch, but what I have here is unreasonable as far as difficulty to use.
Now I know alot of people will quickly jump out and say, "Well why did you buy it if you knew it was blue, etc". Well I had no idea it would be this bad when I bought it. I figured you could turn off the center LED. I didn't know it wouldn't be able to track the color blue. I didn't think the sensor would be so bright from the bottom it would bleed out. And I had no way of knowing the mousewheel would be so stiff and loud. I guess that's what happens when you get ahold of a product that not many people know about or have.
And the real shame is that I really did my homework on this one. I thoroughly researched this and thought I knew everything about it before I got it. Sadly, the majority of reviews about it are from foreign sites, and every youtube video review is either in another language, or they do nothing but an unboxing and never really get into what's going on with the actual product.
So here I am, with a mouse that I absolutely love, but at the same time can't stand because of the wavelength of light coming out of it. And that's just ridiculous. This should never happen. But, being the kind of person who is tyrannical about things looking the right way, I am determined to tear into this thing with reckless abandon and making that damn light be orange.
So, where should I start?
After looking for a new mouse, I finally decided on the Roccat Pyra. I personally prefer small "mobile" sized mice, and I really love the shape and look of the mouse itself. I go for stealthy, techy, angular looking stuff in literally everything I own, so a mouse that looks like a Lamborghini is perfect. The only problem with it is: everything is blue.
Roccat is pretty much unknown to the USA. The company seems to be very popular in Europe, but they have no US support or sales available. Even going to their site to pick a locale, none of the Americas are even on the list. So It's no surprise that getting ahold of their gear is very difficult and expensive to say the least, with steep import and shipping prices and taxes you'll have to pony up if you want to get it in the US. Recently, Amazon started stocking some of their stuff, and that's how I was able to get the Pyra without paying a $30 markup.
All of Roccat's hardware has the same theme; a black and blue color scheme. Which works great for alot of people, I'm sure! But not for me. My current rig is all black and orange (NZXT Vulcan) and I want all of my perhiperals to also be black and orange to match. And before anyone asks, yes I'm one of those people who's psychotically driven to make everything match perfectly at any cost because it's important to me.
So onto the mouse's LED.
All of the Roccat mice have some level of LED lighting to them. The larger mice have multi color LED's in them which allow you to change their color. Awesome, I thought. What about that cool little mobile one? Nope. No color change ability. The tiny Pyra does not have any such option and only has a single bright blue LED housed inside the mouse that shines through a slit between the mouse buttons. it's exceptionally bright, and at all times does this pulsating/throbbing on/off breathing type thing.
This wouldn't be so bad if there was an option to turn it off, but there is none. It does this constantly. It is a nuisance. There is no setting or option to make it stop doing this and it's driving me up the wall. I was considering just opening the mouse up and ripping it out, but I have found no way to open this mouse up. I can only assume there are screws hidden under the slider feet, but I haven't tried pulling it apart yet.
For this specific LED, the goal is to replace the blue LED with an orange LED; and if at all possible, to have it stay lit perpetually and steady without doing the throbbing light thing. I know I will probably have to completely rip this mouse apart to do this, and that's fine, especially if anyone could suggest what to do, like solder this or that, or if someone might need a close up pic of the pcb in there to suggest what to do.
Now for the next issue, the blue sensor on the bottom.
As soon as this mouse touched my mousepad, it didn't do anything. I thought something was wrong, but it works perfectly. It just doesn't track against blue things. And that happens to be a glaring problem that I'm surprised no one has mentioned. The mousepad in question that I used on it first was a Windows Vista orb mousepad that I got ahold of from a dev kit promo box from beta testing Vista while it was in Release Candidate status. They are pretty rare, so I don't expect many people to know what I'm talking about, but just imagine the standard Vista orb logo, but on a plastic top mousepad.
Now, it is to my understanding that all of these newer "blu track" type mice have superior imaging abilities. The mouse itself is a 1600 dpi mouse with a 1000hz polling rate. Sounds pretty good, right? Well why can't it track on the color blue?! I've had to pull out an old junky cloth topped mousepad just so I can use this thing, because of all the blue in the Windows orb graphic that it skips over. I want this blue sensor out of this mouse immediately, and a nice red one in there instead. What's worse (besides having to go find a new mousepad) is that the blue sensor is so bright, the light seeps out of the bottom of the mouse, ruining my whole black and orange thing I have going on here.
So how do you go about doing this? I've read that you can't just change out the sensor part, and apparently you'd have to replace literally all of the chips and everything. Seems like alot of work just to make the sensor color be different. So what's actually giving the sensor it's color? Can you just change the lens or whatever's in there? What about putting some kind of clear paint over it? Transparent colored plastic? There has to be a way around this.
And for the final complaint/mod
This mouse has a tilt wheel for mouse3. It is incredibly stiff, incredibly loud, and takes an incredible amount of pressure to actually click in/over. Is there a way to soften this up or dampen the sound? I'm not kidding, it really goes KER-CHUNK when you press it in. For all the points this mouse wins with looks, style, and comfort, alot of it is ruined with this mousewheel. Maybe I just got a weird one out of the batch, but what I have here is unreasonable as far as difficulty to use.
Now I know alot of people will quickly jump out and say, "Well why did you buy it if you knew it was blue, etc". Well I had no idea it would be this bad when I bought it. I figured you could turn off the center LED. I didn't know it wouldn't be able to track the color blue. I didn't think the sensor would be so bright from the bottom it would bleed out. And I had no way of knowing the mousewheel would be so stiff and loud. I guess that's what happens when you get ahold of a product that not many people know about or have.
And the real shame is that I really did my homework on this one. I thoroughly researched this and thought I knew everything about it before I got it. Sadly, the majority of reviews about it are from foreign sites, and every youtube video review is either in another language, or they do nothing but an unboxing and never really get into what's going on with the actual product.
So here I am, with a mouse that I absolutely love, but at the same time can't stand because of the wavelength of light coming out of it. And that's just ridiculous. This should never happen. But, being the kind of person who is tyrannical about things looking the right way, I am determined to tear into this thing with reckless abandon and making that damn light be orange.
So, where should I start?
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