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Remove batteries from unused electronics!

Recently, on one of my weekend visit-a-new-area-of-melbourne trips, I ventured into a thrift shop and stumbled across a wireless keyboard/mouse combination from Logitec. Usually I wouldn't look twice at the combo, but this time I did as I saw that it had PS/2 connectors at the other end!

My 386 was on its way, so this keyboard would be a perfect complement. I don't often go for wireless input devices as I'm not a fan of battery replacement, but I do remember that a wireless mouse from a previous company worked for around 6 months before showing the haywire symptoms of a dying battery.

Getting it home, I found that the keyboard was void of batteries. I was happy with this, as I didn't want to see anything corroded in there. Unfortunately, this wasn't the same for the mouse. The previous owner had left two cheap AAA batteries in there and one had failed.

I pulled it apart straight away to assess the damage. Most of it was on the actual plate that runs into the battery chamber... but the corrosion had edged its way to the PCB also. Fortunately, on a redundant track. I quickly cleaned this off with alcohol wipes and a bit of scrubbing.

The next trick was to fashion two new plates. I'd recently been dismantling a satellite decoder and this had a lot of RF shielding. One of these metal shields came in handy.

A bit of soldering and some thick legs off a few power diodes and I had two new plates in and new batteries connected!

This is one of the smoothest mice I've ever used, in Windows for Workgroups anyway!