MAKE | HOW TO – ESD removal mouse

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By Collin Cunningham
Posted 2008/09/17 @ 2:20 pm
Category Computers & Mobile, Electronics

A simple and helpful idea – David added a ground contact to his mouse.

I work a lot with ESD sensitive stuff – ICs, transistors and other devices. And that means – if I don’t wanna kill em all I need to discharge often – which is quite annoying. But I happen to work with a computer, and a standard input device – the mouse. Which gave me a nice idea – use the Ground connection of the mouse to discharge me.

Makes a lot of sense for those searching the web for datasheets and identifying ICs often. – ESD removal mouse

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5 Responses to HOW TO – ESD removal mouse

mlange.myopenid.com on September 17th, 2008 at 5:15 pm said:

I’d imagine putting a small bolt into the mouse, with a nut and a spade connector on the inside might be a little less… Dangerous than having the end of the wire poking you all the time.

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Collin Cunningham on September 17th, 2008 at 9:10 pm said:

yups – sounds like a more comfortable option. You could also go one further and use a tack with smooth metal cap.

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Odin84gk on September 18th, 2008 at 6:37 am said:

When you read the article, you will see that he bent the wire to the form of the mouse. I don’t think I would ever feel that.

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jammit on September 18th, 2008 at 11:15 am said:

Something similar happened to me once. I had a laptop that had a nasty habit of giving me a static charge whenever it was handled. It was probably because of the type of plastic the case used. Sometimes I would accidently discharge through the USB, VGA, touchpad or power jack and cause the darn thing to shut down or reboot. I used some aluminum based tape and covered the palmrest area around the touchpad. The tape wrapped around the top half of the case and was grounded to the system ground. I wanted to add a few megs of resistance to it, but that wasn’t easily done, so I left it directly connected. Arcing over to tape never shut down or rebooted the machine, so I left it as is.

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daqq on September 18th, 2008 at 11:52 am said:

Actually I don’t feel the wire there at all – I’ve melted it into the plactic abit, and now I don’t feel a thing.

Note: Will work only if your PC is grounded to the mains – notebooks are a nono.

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