Silent Switches on a Trackball Mouse
Replacing the switches on a Logitech M570 thumb trackball mouse with silent switches.
Silent Switches
I really dislike loud clicks - mouse or keyboard. What purpose do they serve? It's just noise! Especially late at night it drives me crazy. If you ever try to play a video game or do something that involves a lot of clicking it's just a constant hum of click click click click. I use quiet switches on my split keyboard, and my laptop keyboards are all pretty silent, but for my thumb trackball there was no solution to stop the constant clicks. Logitech now makes some silent mice, but as far as I could find it doesn't seem like anyone is selling a trackball - thumb or otherwise - with quiet switches.
We recently had a baby which has been amazing - he is really such a fun and delightful little guy. Although I had some overly ambitious plans of learning Rust while on paternity leave (hahahahaha), I figured I could at least tackle my loud mouse problem during a nap. I told myself it would help my wife and baby sleep better, but really it seems like I'm the only one who's bothered by the click click click so I just accepted I'm neurotic and got on with finding a solution.
The Solution
I had never opened up and modified a mouse before, but I have a little experience messing around with a soldering iron from when I built my split keyboard and did some hobby projects around Halloween with an Arduino. I did some research online and found some silent mouse switches and bought a bag from AliExpress. A month later I had them in the mail. I can't find the exact link I purchased but if you search "Kailh Silent Microswitch" you should be able to find them.
Armed with my new switches and a soldering iron I figured how hard could it be? And it wasn't that bad! Disassembling the mouse was simple enough, and while I had some difficulty desoldering the original switches I was eventually able to get them off. Once the new silent switches were soldered in I put everything back together and it worked! The mouse clicks are now practically silent - just like I wanted! Awesome!
Video
Here's a video of the mod and some of the steps along the way. This was a fun and satisfying project! Maybe the video will help another poor soul who just can't stand loud mouse clicks!