I have an old trackball mouse that I got at a garage sale for $2 and I’m interested in re-purposing it as a midi controller. I’ve noticed that I can isolate the data coming from it from other mice with vvvv’s mouse nodes, but it’s not especially usable if I can’t also stop it from affecting windows as a mouse.
From a quick browse of the forum, it doesn’t look like VVVV has any native capacity for disabling specific mouse input. Autohotkey looks like it probably can, but I haven’t been able to find any specific documentation on how to do it and I’m not super keen to dive too far into AHK just for this.
Has anyone successfully disabled specific mouse input in windows so the data can be used by VVVV?
I don’t think that will be possible with standard windows features. In your device manager you can disable the driver for a specific mouse, but then the whole device is basically gone and not visible anymore to any application.
I fear you’ll have to write your own windows input driver to get the desired behavior - but if you write an input driver which doesn’t register itself as a mouse device the vvvv mouse nodes will also not be usable anymore. So you’ll also have to write your own vvvv node which is able to talk to your special input device driver.
Another approach would be to use a computer in between (there’re small ones like a lattepanda nowadays available) which translates the mouse data to some other format which you can then send to your main computer.
Yeah, in the past I’ve used a lattepanda for exactly that, but it can be a bit fiddly and I’d hoped to find a native solution.
I’ve noticed a few people writing glovepie or AHK scripts that disable the native input to both mice, then remap one back to normal function and use the input of the other for something else. Unfortunately glovepie is pretty archaic at this point and I wasn’t able to get a few functions to work, and AHK looked like it’d require a fair bit of time to understand on a level where I could adapt it to do what I need.
It’s unfortunate that windows’ keyboard and mouse input system isn’t a bit more robust for “creative reinterpretation”. Repurposing old input devices could be really useful.
