I’d like to introduce the world to the future of clicking: The Honey Clicker. Some of this process was documented in a twitter thread I posted as I made it, but I think it’s time to tell the whole story.
This is a functioning wireless mouse that is only capable of left clicking and which is suspended in honey. I made it for a Slideshare-Roulette party I was hosting. What’s Slideshare-Roulette? It’s where you get a bunch of friends together to take turns presenting slide decks from slideshare.net that they’ve never seen before. I called mine TUD Talks. And of course, my presenters needed a way to advance their slides, so I created the Honey Clicker.
This particular project started its life as a $12 wireless mouse and a google search to check if what I was planning was viable.
I pried it open and started taking the good stuff out of it.
I soldered wires to the negative and positive leads of the battery holder as well as soldering my own arcade button to the left click on the board. For the arcade button, I used plug connectors so I could easily connect or disconnect. I knew the rest of this thing was getting dipped in honey so I wanted to try and keep the button as non-sticky as possible before the big day.
Next up was putting the battery in the honey and testing that the mouse still functioned.
So far so good! I hit a small snag with the rest of the circuit board, though.
It was a little too wide, so I traced the red power lead to a different point on the board, resoldered the wire there and sawed off a chunk of the board.
Now we were in business and it was time for this board to take a dip!
I needed to drill a quick hole in the top to let the button poke out.
After that, everything fit in and remained functional!
That was a few days before the party. After testing, I took the equipment out so I could have fresh batteries for the big day. When TUD Talks came around, the only thing I hadn’t done was properly mount the button, so I got some sand paper and made the hole a snug fit.
The only snag I hit came with the battery. I dropped it in the honey as planned.
But it soon got disconnected and stuck in one of the rounded parts of the plastic. No big loss, though. I just pulled the wires out and attached another battery. I had to drain some honey out to fit everything, but having the extra battery in there wasn’t hurting anything.
Everything else went in and the Honey Clicker was complete!
