Mounting the Crayola Kidsball

A while back, these things were all the rage on BYOAC.  A 3" trackball with an arcade-like feel, but without the arcade price.  So naturally, I had to have one when I saw it at Fry's...  The main problem with these is that they are very diffucult to mount on a control panel.  So I came up with a solution:

The top half of the Kidsball, cut-down and mounted to the black box with hot glue

To mount the trackball, I put the original Crayola housing inside a black project housing from an electronics store.  This was done by cutting away part of the Crayola's housing so it fit inside the black box.  Then I drilled a hole in the black box the same size (2 3/4") as the hole in the top of the trackball.  I hot-glued the Crayola housing inside the top half of the black box, so the holes lined up.  (Remove the ball and bottom half first to make things easier.)  Now it can be easily mounted on a flat surface.  I cut a square hole in the control panel to mount the box into, then used some L-brackets to connect to the panel.

Super-bright blue LEDs installed

I also wired two 2600mcd blue LEDs to the base, and replaced the original trackball with a translucent blue onel.  All the LEDs connect to my custom lighting board, which draws power from the PC's +5v supply.

The complete Kidsball mounted

FINAL INSTALLATION

To finish off, I cut a hole in my control panel Lexan, a little smaller (2 9/16") than the hole in the black box and the trackball housing.  I used a hand-made hole drill to cut the odd-sized hole, using a paintbrush handle, a nail, and a router-bit arbor.  The tip of the arbor bolt was put thru a 1/4" pilot hole in the Lexan, then drilled slowly to scrape away at the Lexan until a hole was made all the way through.

The final installation

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