Pimoroni Trackball PIM447 issues: won’t work as mouse

Hi there!

Got a neat Pimoroni trackball, but having trouble with some of the github code supporting it.

I can get some of the py examples to work (rainbow, colour-control) just fine, but the ones that are really important such as mouse.py (xte not found) and evdev-mouse.py (no module named ‘evdev’) don’t work.

I’m using Raspbian as recommended, trying to make the trackball work as a mouse. Unfortunately the documentation is pretty much inexistent, thus there’s not much I can do without your help. :)

Any hint or tip of where I should start to make it work?

Cheers!

Did you do the?

You must:

sudo modprobe uinput

sudo cp 10-trackball.rules /etc/udev/rules.d/

sudo udevadm control --reload-rules

And run this script as root with:

sudo ./evdev-mouse.py

Yep, as instructed. I get the error ‘no module named evdev’

Is there a driver for it or just the python programs?

Ok, wasn’t sure if you had seen that message in the file.
I don’t have that trackball. One issue is it uses i2c instead of the USB bus. That makes it tricky to use as a mouse etc. At least I would think so.
The last time I used evdev I was following this tutorial. Might help, not sure?
https://learn.pimoroni.com/tutorial/robots/controlling-your-robot-wireless-keyboard

Also found this,
https://python-evdev.readthedocs.io/en/latest/

Right, the issue was indeed missing installation of Python evdev (for evdev-mouse.py) and xautomation (for mouse.py), none of which are installed by default nor are covered in the documentation on github (which is pretty flimsy, to be candid).

I’ll open a github ticket on the project hoping this gets added/explained, the package could really do with some love on the docs side. ;)

Glad you figured it out. Bummer when some instructions are missing etc though.