Human trackball

Remember Logitech's April Fools' video from 2017? The one where the gym ball works as a trackball? I made that for real:

I did this as kind of a detour while working on the next version of my Bluetooth trackball from last year (stay tuned for that). I found a board on AliExpress that has the nRF52832 Bluetooth chip from Nordic, an MPU-9250 9DOF sensor, a built-in battery charging circuit and comes with a lipo battery attached. Originally a development board for a fitness bracelet, it looked like a pretty good match for my needs.

For this application I just attached the board to the gym ball using scotch tape (and tried to avoid sitting on it or crushing it by rolling the ball).

The software is derived from my previous IMU-based Bluetooth trackball attempt. This time I decided to do the sensor fusion algorithm in software - even though the MPU-9250 is better than the MPU-6050 because it has a magnetometer (3 more DOFs!), its onboard algorithm was not updated to make use of it - it still only uses the accelerometer and gyroscope. So I used Adafruit's library implementing Sebastian Madgwick's sensor fusion algorithm. I also used Sandeep Mistry's Arduino core for the nRF52832 chip and his BLEPeripheral library for Bluetooth. I programmed the board using Nordic's nRF52 DK development kit.

You can find the code here. Also included is a sketch for calibrating the magnetometer that sends the data over Bluetooth serial (I used Adafruit's Bluefruit Connect app to read the data). And since the gym ball itself has no way of performing button clicks, I used a foot switch connected to a Digispark for clicking the mouse. A sketch for that is also included.

Even though it looks like a trackball, the ball works more like a joystick in this case: when you tilt it to the right, the cursor moves as long as the ball is kept in that position and stops moving when it is returned to the neutral starting position. Right now it's not really a practical mouse or trackball replacement, but I believe that with some fine tuning it might become a viable option. Another possibility would be to only use it for scrolling, not moving the cursor, which I haven't tested, but it should be an easy modification.

Can't wait for Logitech's next year April Fools' video!