using a mouse with a Pragmatic 2414A Arbitray Waveform Generator?

[Stray Electron]

  I picked up a surplus Pragmatic (now Tegam) 2414A AWG and fixed it.  I downloaded the manual and read it and it mentions that you can use an "optional" serial mouse to "draw" new waveforms and store them in the 2414.  The 2414 has a DB-9 serial port on it so I dug out an old IBM PC compatible mouse and tried using it. It does work but the mouse is overly sensitive and displayed data point jumps around the screen (I have the 2414 output connected to an O'scope and displaying the 2414 input live.)

    Does anyone know anything about the mouse that's supposed to be used with the 2414? This mouse uses chopper wheels and optical encoders internally I'm also wondering if I can desensitize the mouse by cutting out every other vane in the chopper wheels.   Does anyone have any experience doing something like this?

[daddario]

You probably can't lower the sensitivity of the mouse by cutting the bars - wheel mice and other rotary encoders rely on the known length of the blank and transparent parts of the wheel. Outputs of two opto pairs are compared and the direction/step count calculated from that data.