the eagle-eyed among you have probably seen this LTT mousepad many times over
the last oh i don't know six months
six months that's cute past Linus
we tried to launch this video eight months ago when we got our first
shipment of desk pads but you you guys bought them all then we tried to launch
the video again three months later and you bought them all again we have loved
all of your feedback on the mousepads you guys can actually check out some reviews on the store page and finally we
have our biggest restock yet but i can't promise you that they will last long
anyway back to you past Linus what you haven't
seen is the absolutely painful amount of r d that went into our attempt at making
the best mouse pad we possibly could we didn't actually intend to make a video
about this experience but we ended up learning so much that i felt that we had
to share it with you here's how it went down
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feast your eyes on LTT's first peripheral well sort of it doesn't look
like it should have taken 15 months but the truth is we had no idea how much was
involved in doing something like this right i thought it was going to be as
simple as ask one of our lovely designers lloyd in this case to create
some options for artwork get nick to contact some overseas vendors to
requisition samples evaluate the samples
and you know the communication of the suppliers and bippity boppity we print
them well for starters about half of the requests for samples we sent out never
even got a response their loss i guess and out of the many that we received a
couple of weeks later only four of them weren't obviously garbage even out of
those four none of them were perfect which was a big wake-up call for us
there's varying materials print qualities and of course costs and as
part of this process we also bought a whack of competing mouse pads for
comparison but how do you compare
if you have no data well aesthetic appeal and overall feel are easy but
those aren't definitive rankings we wanted to actually quantify the
performance of each sample pad so we needed data we challenged the jank
master supreme alex to rig something up in the workshop and
well i'll let him speak for himself this is the basic plan for our testing
here you know just toss down a mouse pad
and then we're going to use the little cnc rotor here to like wrap it around in
a bunch of different ways to be able to precisely track
how much the mouse is moving and then you know switch out the mouse pad throw
another one in and it'll do its circles or whatever again
only problem is i some have to attach this mouse
to the router and i'm not entirely sure how to do it one
of the problems is that you know if this goes up and down
i don't know exactly how much force there is
but i think it's uh
like 960 newton meters which is it's way too much for a mouse
to handle for sure you know before we do this i'm going to put on some safety
glasses just in case something to be clear
the scroll wheel on this mouse actually is broken so if we blow it up it's not
the end of the world but you know we still don't want to
that said let's give her
seems to be working because we know that our cnc router's movement is
sufficiently accurate and repeatable we tested it and we mostly trust the
engineers at logitech who designed their hero sensor we can assume that on a
mouse pad with perfect tracking characteristics the input path should
match the output plot of our mouse's movement within experimental margin of
error so the idea here is we tell the router to draw a perfect circle over and
over again and we expect to see basically one circle in the software at
the end we expect unfortunately the data was
all over the place which is why we were moments from placing our bulk order only
to end up delaying this product for another six months at the time we
weren't sure what was to blame we had some theories that maybe our pressure on
the mouse was too high or too low or our
dpi settings were bad and that is something we ultimately had to fine-tune
but what ultimately ended up solving the problem was a stiffer mount for the
mouse how did we know that our testing rig was bad ah i'm glad you asked
truthfully until fnatic contacted us claiming to have made the world's most
accurate mouse pad i hadn't even given it a lot of thought i mean
yeah isn't it the mouse that determines how well it tracks well sort of
here's the thing an optical mouse works essentially by taking pictures
many times per second of the surface that it's moving over
some fancy math happens and it determines how far it's moved and in
which direction by comparing the images which is great as long as the mouse
exists in a world where the surface is perfect the pictures are perfect and all
bodies are completely rigid but they're not
so credit to fanatic they really did make a great mouse pad and studying it
has taught us a lot about how to make ours better
one thing we figured out even before using theirs as a point of comparison
was that using a stretchy material could affect the tracking of the mouse
think about it take this pad for instance it stretches in one direction
but not in the other direction so when you move this way it kind of
forms a bow wave ripple if you press hard enough into the pad
not that you would do that but it's interesting nonetheless
and while we're at it what if the bottom surface of the pad doesn't grip the desk
properly i mean that's a ridiculous example we're looking at here but on a
smaller scale that is a real factor
armed then with our stiffer mount and a mouse pad that the manufacturer claims
can produce this perfectly consistent performance we set to work trying to
replicate their results from this point on creator warehouse's very own engineer
kyle took the reins and in short order built us a new test rig using our prusa
print farm for all the custom bits aluminum extrusion for the structure and
a bunch of 3d printer hardware for the electronics it's pretty bare bones as
far as a cnc machine goes it uses a ramps board for the electronics
essentially an arduino mega some cheap nema 17 size stepper motors and gt2
belts we couldn't know until it was built if
it would be rigid enough for our testing but the name of the game here is if
you're going to fail do it fast and do it cheap
and conveniently once it was equipped with a new mouse holder that kyle
reverse engineered from fnatic's picture of their test rig it did end up doing
the trick it's not perfect perfect but given that logitech only guarantees 98
accuracy for the hero sensor this test data from fanatics pad looks about right
for our test the carriage moves the mouse around in a perfect circle 26
times while we run a super simple pointer plotter on a laptop connected to
the mouse which sorry in spite of this being a g305 is still a gpro wireless
running the test this way tells us two things one
if fnatic's test can be repeated by a third party which for all intents and
purposes it can it's a great mouse pad and two
whether or not we can match or beat their performance
let's talk about that now in our attempt we sourced two new versions of the LTT
pad from the same supplier now at the time we were mostly focused on the
stretchiness of the material so we asked for one with two-way rather than one-way
stretch so at least we'd have consistency to it
and we also asked for one with no stretch and as it turns out
funny story the first sample we had with the one-way stretch was actually far and
away the most consistent when it came to tracking even better than the no stretch
sample that our supplier couldn't even do full color printing on so it wouldn't
even like look all cool we're still not quite on
par with the data and fanatics marketing materials and i do still think that we
might see an LTT pad pro in another year
that manages to be absolutely perfect but
we are close enough that anyone but the most professional of gamers is not going
to notice the difference so all that was left at this point was to adapt our
design for the 15 different sizes
finalize the thickness we settled on three and a half millimeter by the way
which i feel is a great balance between soft comfort and performance
and await our final samples so
this is it the LTT mouse pad
take it in yeah it doesn't smell that good i cannot say how proud i am of our team
for getting this done even for something as simple as a mousepad so many hands
are involved in getting you guys the best possible swag and i hope that you
enjoyed this long awaited piece of kit and you can see the whole lineup in our
shameless promotion ShortCircuit unboxing video over on our other channel
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for yourself before they all sell out oh something to note by the way there
are no limit switches to protect the cnc machine from traveling too far and once
it powers on it has no idea where in space it is because it has no way to
reference a home position so if you decide to use the files linked in the
video description to make one for yourself just make sure you're a diligent
operator because otherwise it could ruin itself pretty quickly but that won't
happen to you you're a diligent operator