An old PS/2 Mouse, preferably one that has a ball rather than an optical one, and one that uses a Rotary encoder as a scroll wheel, not one that uses an IR Transmitter/Detector.To build your own, you'll need the following (note that some of the parts are interchangable, say the R/C car wheel, while some are very specific, like the type of mouse you use): It's made from an old PS/2 Mouse, a project box and, yep you guessed it, an old R/C car. I fancied a bit of that, so away I went and this is what I came up with. A few googles later, and I found a post on the bit-tech forums about a guy who made his own from a VCR spindle and an old mouse. I took a look at some YouTube videos of it in use and thought it was literally a scroll mouse on it's side with a fancy knob and some software. The PowerMate is an assignable controller that you can set up for many things, browsing Google Earth, scrolling, Controlling volume etc. In my searching, I came across this: - The Griffin PowerMate.

I didn't much fancy this though, so I set about looking for easier ways to scroll long distances. I could have set my RSS reader up with each of the blogs that I read and go through the titles daily, or I could have set up a Yahoo! Pipe to filter by words in the title. The problem for me came when I realised that only some of the posts were interesting to me, and to get to the interesting ones took a lot of scrolling. Each day I'll read the latest posts on engadget, lifehacker, hackaday, BBG and the MAKE: blog. Make Magazine's weekend project, 3/4/09 Some Background Recently, I've been reading a lot of different blogs.

Volume scroll wheel