3 Simple Ways to
Share What You Make

With Instructables you can share what you make with the world — and tap into an ever-growing community of creative experts.

PhotosPhotos

Share one or more photos of a project, recipe, or whatever you've made, quickly and easily.

Get Started

Learn more & Get Tips

Step by StepStep-By-Step

Share your step-by-step photos with text instructions of what you made so others can do it too!

Get Started

Learn more & Get Tips

VideoVideo

Share your how-to video. You'll need your embed code from a video site such as YouTube.

Get Started

Learn more & Get Tips

Favorite

How to : Change the LED color on an optical mouse.

video How to : Change the LED color on an optical mouse.

Here's my entry to the L.E.D. contest The best thing with this hack is that it works!

17 comments

Nov 28, 2010. 11:25 AMjona991 says:

I made one whith a white slightly bleu LED works good and looks cool. Now it's a sort of flashlight thingy.

Dec 26, 2009. 5:49 PMFirecrow says:

Really was not hard at all. I Did manage to destroy one mouse but that was because i was not paying attention when clipping the wires and managed to clip the usb cable as well. HAHA i know i'm a genius. I found that Green is really hard to get to work. Maybe i just did not have a bright enough green led i am not entirely sure but Blue worked absolutely perfectly. It was probabl kinda pointless for me to do because i never see the laser. But heck how many people can honestly say they have a blue laser mouse.

Dec 9, 2009. 11:27 PMdnlgreenwood says:

hehehe this would take me like 2 minutes... and I would definitely go with a green LED. but what do i do with the leftover red led... i wonder.... how about use 2 or LEDs at once? (e.g red+green=yellow, red+green+blue=clear) thats a great idea

:D-]-<[:

i just recently replaced the wimpy crd on my tiny usb mouse with the fattet usb cord I could find, so I am not reluctant to tri it on my moue right away. and my wireles one i to expensive to do this on D:

Feb 11, 2008. 9:43 AMgamer says:

"(any color will work tough)". im guessing you meant "though". nice project, but its already been posted. o well...

May 31, 2009. 5:07 PM

TechNerd1012 says:

or maybe itll work tough too lol jk nice instructable though

Feb 11, 2008. 4:19 PMlordofthedonuts (author) says:

Please excuse my English it's not my native language.

Feb 12, 2008. 12:15 PMgamer says:

its ok.

Feb 11, 2008. 2:42 PMrakol1 says:

Where did you get your leds?

Feb 11, 2008. 4:20 PMlordofthedonuts (author) says:

I get my LEDs from a surplus electronic store, if you're in the United States or in Canada you can go to radio shack, but try to go to a surplus electronic store or a specialized electronic store, you'll get better prices, if you can't, try online.

Jan 17, 2009. 5:48 AMHycro says:

I like buying cheap kid's toys, and stripping the parts from them, sometimes I get lucky and most of the parts in one of them are almost all the ones I need, and already soldered on a board that'll do what I need it to do, like in the case of when I bought the $1 bicycle safety light for a kid's bike, I got 3 high brightness red LEDs that are clear when off, and it was perfect to mound inside my computer behind a windowed 3.5" bay cover, and I used the back of the safety light's casing to hold the board, resistor, and 5K POT in place, with some help of double-side foam tape. Looking at the brightness without the plate in front of it, I was thinking that I probably could have done without the resistor, and just found the best value with the POT, which is currently set at zero resistance, making it kind of pointless right now. I only put the POT in there because the light ran off two standard 1.5V AA size batteries, and I was running it off the 5V line on the 3.5" floppy power connector.

Apr 25, 2008. 10:09 PMmaniac269 says:

yeah... i broke my mouse. :(

Sep 3, 2008. 8:00 PMlordofthedonuts (author) says:

sorry i'm very late, maybe if you tell me what's going wrong I can help you, just Private Message me if you need help.

Sep 3, 2008. 7:58 PMlordofthedonuts (author) says:

Maybe it's harder than it looks, I didn't broke my mouse but i had to do a repair on the pcb (my bad), it takes some board soldering skills... Maybe I set the difficulty level too low...

Sep 3, 2008. 4:01 PMTechnoled says:

I need to change my old mouse but not with the same red led... Good idea, it look high-tech. I dont whant to break a new mouse so I just ordered an already modified one at Blue LED Mouse I cannot take the chance to spend an hour for the modification and take the chance to destroy a new mouse. And its not easy to found one ultra-bright blue led.

Sep 3, 2008. 7:55 PMlordofthedonuts (author) says:

Yeah that's also an option I don't know this website, but it doesn't fit with my pure DIY philisophy, hehe.