This blog post was originally sent as an email update to our mailing list on 03/08/2022.
Hi,
In last month's update I was excited to announce the arrival of our first injection-molded plastics. Since then, we've been adjusting the fit and finish of the plastic parts. I'll be sending out another update as soon as we have those improvements completed. For the rest of this email, I'll explain a bit about how we engineered the Hydrogen to deliver our Zero Latency Clicks no matter what game you're playing.
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A mouse has two basic functions: to move and to click. The performance of the mouse is how well it performs these two functions. This is measured by how quickly and accurately the mouse sends motion and click information to the computer. The Hydrogen was designed to push its components to their functional limits, for the highest performance possible. We even published a paper detailing the proper method of implementing switches for low latency (you can read it here).
The Hydrogen performs so well, in fact, that in our testing we found that certain games, like Minecraft, are unable to keep up with its rate of information. The solution, until those certain games are able to harness the full capability of the Hydrogen, is to artificially limit the rate of data coming in. We couldn't just leave it at that, though -- we knew there had to be a way to maximize performance even with a limited data rate.
The simple solution to limiting the data rate on the mouse is to reduce the polling rate -- which is the rate that all mouse data is sent to the computer: x & y motion, clicks, and scrolls. Considering that the bulk of the information being sent over is motion sensor data, this would unnecessarily increase the latency of click and scroll data.
Our solution employs more complex engineering in order to optimize performance. We let you limit sensor rate independently of the polling rate, leaving the click and scroll data at 8,000 Hz. The sensor rate is the rate at which the mouse will capture data from the motion sensor. This is done in our software by setting the "Sensor Rate Target" option:
This approach lets you enjoy the higher responsiveness of our Zero Latency Click technology even if the game you're playing can't handle the full speed of the motion data.
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Thanks for taking the time to read these updates. I know everyone wants me to announce a release date, and trust me, there's nothing I'd like more. Production is difficult; there are many moving parts from all over the world. For that reason, I'm hesitant to announce the release date until I have the final product in hand, which I hope will be quite soon now. I hope these updates give you an idea of how close we are.
Cheers --
Dimitar Dimitrov
Founder, Atompalm.