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What makes the Logitech G Pro X2 Superstrike so special? This deep dive explains the difference between its inductive technology and the Hall effect sensors found in keyboards, and how it delivers a 'hair-trigger' response.
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00:00It's the first mouse that has analog type of technology. Up until today we didn't really know
00:04how gamers were clicking on their mouse. With the design by collaboration we realized how
00:09successful we were because some of them switched to our mouse right one week before a tournament
00:16so it's been for them it was a seamless adoption. 60 micrometer is the size of a human hair right
00:21so many people call the when you said to highest sensitivity they call that the hair trigger
00:26because you just have to move by the width of a hair to get the switch to register right.
00:37I recently sat down with Logitech's chief engineer Regis Cressonnier and another engineer called
00:43Frederick to talk about the Logitech G Pro X2 Superstrike, Logitech's new mouse. This mouse allows
00:49you to set your actuation point super low and enable rapid trigger for speedier clicks. Logitech calls a
00:55technology that underpins this HITS or the haptic inductive trigger system. As the name suggests
01:01there are two parts to this induction and haptics. Essentially pressing your left or right mouse button
01:07makes a small piece of metal move through a magnetic field that's generated by a coil and the sensor can
01:12measure this disturbance to the field and tell how far the button has been pressed. When it reaches the
01:17point you've set it to it will trigger a click which makes the haptic vibration motor rumble and this
01:22feels like a mouse click. These technologies aren't completely new but they are new to gaming mice
01:27and they've never been combined in quite this way before. The obvious place to start is with the
01:33difference between Logitech's inductive system and the hall effect that's used in many of the latest
01:37analog gaming keyboards. In keyboard the big trend right now it was hall effect sensor now it's also
01:43moving to TMR both works with a magnet that's on the plunger of the of the switch of the keyboard.
01:49You know full-size keyboard switches there are four millimeters of travel and this technology is
01:53actually quite nice to really sense over the full range that we have here. So four millimeters
01:58it's quite a long travel right. Now we will think about the mouse here it's less than one millimeter of
02:03travel. The average total travel distance is more like 0.65 millimeter. In that case inductive sensing
02:11is much more sensitive to this type of very small displacement so it was kind of the obvious choice
02:19to integrate this technology in there. I'd heard from other manufacturers about a lack of accuracy in
02:24hall effect technology due to manufacturing variations so I was keen to know if the induction technology
02:30here helped avoid this. For this type of variation that we might have in the process we have dynamic
02:36calibration so we are always adjusting to all the variations so there's calibration at the production
02:41and then we also dynamically calibrate during the life of the product to account for all of these
02:46errors. So it's also working with magnetism but it's it's more like electromagnetic magnetic field
02:53it's more of a field so the coils that you see you saw the picture where you see the two
02:56coils the pair of
02:56coils under each key plate they will generate a magnetic field but a magnetic field that's not static it
03:03will vary it's very short pulses of magnetic fields and these short pulses of magnetic field will be
03:09will be induce some current inside of that metal plate so the metal plate has to be conductive and
03:16this current in the metal plate will interact with the main magnetic field and we can measure this
03:22interaction and then determine the distance between the coil and the target. I was also keen to learn
03:29about how quickly the induction switches could respond given the differences between sensor and micro
03:34controller workloads on induction and hall effect keyboards. Most of the time the hall effect sensor
03:40will kind of directly spit out the information they will there is a an output on the little chip that
03:47you put under the switch under the magnet and you just have to read it right away. For inductive sensing
03:53so it's as fast as this but we had to implement so it's our own solution that we developed for
03:59inductive
04:00sensing and we had to implement the driving ourselves in the microcontroller so it was a big part of the
04:06the project also to be able to drive them precisely and to get that output directly from the microcontroller.
04:12The time it takes to sample one of the coils that you see here one of the sensor is less
04:17than 10 microseconds and
04:19at 8 kilohertz we have availability of time of 125 microseconds so the way we've done it now yeah less
04:25than 10 and both sensors both keys are being sensed in parallel so overall less than 10 microseconds for
04:33both of them. So there are two technologies coming together in the HITS system that's inductive sensing and
04:38haptic feedback. I wondered which one they implemented first in the super strike. This idea of having
04:44analog sensing in products is not new right we've been doing prototypes a while and you know there's
04:50analog in keyboards the analog keyboards there's no tactility but it appeared to be fine for the gamers
04:55that there's no tactility in the keyboard because anyway you will bottom out the the keycap right you
05:01will touch the bottom and basically the tactility kind of come from the impact impact at the bottom even
05:06though the the switch was registered like much earlier right on the mouse it's kind of a very
05:11different scenario you don't you really don't use the mouse the same way you will use a keyboard we
05:17need much more precision on the way you input stuff on the key plates here and so we had some
05:22prototype
05:22a while back without any haptic feedback and we noticed it's not usable as a product the mouse the
05:29gamers they need this tactility to give them confidence that they register the click is those the function
05:35associated to the mouse clicks are so important in game you cannot not be sure something happened
05:40right what we saw is that the gamers will often when they first use the mouse set it to the
05:45strongest
05:46settings so where it vibrates the most so that they are really sure something happened but then
05:50they realize it's not the most comfortable one it's not the one that gives you the most performance
05:54so they usually guttily take it down but it's kind of a pretty fast learning curve to just find the
06:00sweet spot
06:00and get be sure that you registered your click you can disable the haptic right yeah and you quickly
06:06understand that oh my gosh it was the obvious thing right to tell okay we need to have a haptic
06:11right to provide the same click feeling that people have with the regular mouse you know basically
06:17you tried the induction first you realized that it wasn't it wasn't didn't feel great without haptics
06:23and then you added the haptic i think we knew we would need the haptic anyway i think it was
06:27of use so
06:27if you take a switch there is two functions a sensing and the clipping right we need to rebuild it
06:33but how might we make it customizable now the implementation this is where we had to put a lot
06:39of food say energy to tune the experience to reach a level where everybody loved it we need to have
06:46this
06:46kind of actuator inside because you know with rapid trigger the click can either occur at the top at the
06:51bottom or at the middle you cannot put something static that generates some feeling at the same location
06:55otherwise it will not be in sync with when the click is being sent to the computer right and we
07:01really
07:01worked hard to make sure that as soon as the click is being detected we can trigger the haptics right
07:05away and you feel it instantly as soon as you send the click and also on the click that you
07:10feel so this
07:11was a lot it took a lot of time for us to really optimize this feeling because you know the
07:15the component
07:16we are putting inside it's more like a buzzer it's not meant to generate click feeling it's meant to make
07:21long vibration kind of a razor type of thing so we really had to work out on the driving of
07:27this
07:27also working with the supplier of that LRA component to really optimize how we can do what we can do
07:33with
07:33that component so that we and then we work with the pro to understand what was the feeling that was
07:38kind of a legacy type of feeling from the the super light mouse so testing with the pro what's the
07:44best
07:45uh sensation to generate with this and then we landed it on that type of feeling that we provide to
07:52five
07:52different levels of intensity and here i think with the design by collaboration we realized how
07:58successful we were because some of them switched to our mouse right one week before a tournament so
08:06it's been for them it was a seamless adoption so far there hadn't been any talk about potential downsides
08:11so i asked whether the pro players that logitech had worked with had asked for anything they struggled
08:15to accommodate what we learned a lot was on the degree of customized customizability that they
08:21wanted because we have this technology that's capable of a lot and then it was a matter of
08:25giving them the range they need for the customization don't give too much don't do not give enough
08:32so this we we really had to work with them to understand what sensitive so right now it's divided in
08:3610 steps the sensor which we define as a sweet spot for them to have that level of customization
08:43why not be overwhelmed by too many settings when we are talking distance so as we say we wanted to
08:47keep the exact same travel distance as a normal switch so this 0.65 millimeter so now we have 10
08:53steps of sensing onto this meaning you take this 0.65 by 10 it's about 60 micrometer of displacement
08:5960 micrometer is the size of a human hair right so many people call the when you set to higher
09:04sensitivity they call that the hair trigger because you just have to move by the width of a hair
09:10to get the switch to register right the super strike is combining some bleeding edge technologies
09:15so i wondered whether this might give the mouse more points of failure and cause problems long term
09:20for instance there have been double click issues with some mice in the past
09:24the double click issue often occur from mechanical issue inside of the switch right because in a normal
09:29switch you will have this metallic this contact to your mechanical contact so two metal plates that
09:37touch together and you have the electrical circuit that's being shorted and this will age and because
09:43of that impact it will just create some erosion dust whatever and this is where most of the issue
09:50comes from because of impact here it's really a switch less mouse there's no switch there's nothing that
09:55impacts it's with only a key plate moving in the air and that key plates being able to oscillate but
10:00also always suspending in the air so it's much more likely to fail because of this kind of usual
10:07failure point it's the first mouse that has analog type of technology up until today we didn't really
10:12know how gamers were clicking on their mouse do they preload a lot the switch they lift their finger
10:17and do they go all the way down do they oscillate in the middle this is all new stuff that
10:21we were able to
10:22now monitor for real on pro gamers and really every what we saw is that everybody is different right
10:28so it's really why it's important to set the settings if as you said the the sensor will sense
10:34everything that you do you move by a few tenths of millimeter micrometer sorry we will record it so
10:40if so it if it happened and that's not what you wanted to do you want to the mouse kind
10:45of discard it
10:45then just change slightly the setting to be slightly less sensitive in this area where you don't want to
10:50to set it's new technology that opens up a whole new world of possibilities but also of uh issues
10:56but these issues can be solved with the customization technology wise there is no mechanical piece in
11:00friction we have more robust system in term of last time right and then on the other side no our
11:09technology is robust super strike is about the same weight as the previous super light 2 and that's
11:14heavier than some other mice on the market these days logitech doesn't see this as much of an issue
11:18though so when we did the really first proof of concept the traction was immediate from the pro so
11:23very quickly we went on the production of prototypes which were uh three printed and with cnc parts in
11:30them and those so we gave one 150 of this prototype to the pro gamers and those were at 68
11:36grams uh so
11:38we are a bit concerned uh if that would be too heavy but we just wanted to give them very
11:41quickly the
11:42prototype for them to try the the hits technology and the feedback we had from this is that
11:46it the the improvement the the benefit from the hits technology was really the thing they cared
11:53about that the weight was kind of secondary for them but we knew from the burning that we had to
11:57reduce this weight right but since it was a very short project and we wanted to announce it in september
12:02for the logiplay event we were at the pilot build phase and at this point we only managed to get
12:09the
12:09weight down to 64 grams so at this stage we announced 65 to be safe but we had some more
12:16months to work on
12:17it and we really shaved down everything we cooled into the mouse while maintaining its robustness and
12:23the logitech quality right and now it's 61 grams if you can give numbers usually when you start to
12:29talk about the technology or prototype right and between time we have the proto the time we implement in
12:34a product i would tell us average time is between two to three years here we knew we had a
12:40golden
12:40magnet in our hands right so we wanted to move fast so we took all shortcuts we could right this
12:45is why
12:46as fred said we need you know 3d printing we found other way to move fast we are trying to
12:51do
12:51what makes sense so we said okay lightweight reach a point where everybody can enjoy it right what's next
12:56how can we even further improve the experience and performance of our gamers and we have a
13:02plenty of other ideas right in the pipeline we're trying to optimize our ambient software to save 10
13:07microsecond latencies right good but how might we do differently and i think super super strike is a
13:13good example where we came with a new technology helping us to save 30 milliseconds yeah you know so
13:19it's much bigger than what we're trying to achieve by saving one micro when 10 microseconds here or here
13:25you know the super strikes new tech is definitely exciting but it does come at a cost 180 dollars to
13:31be
13:31precise i wanted to know whether this technology could be ported to cheaper mice down the line
13:37no doubt no doubt one could consider you know uh i think now we need to understand right we need
13:41to
13:41we need to keep working with pro i'm sure we learn we'll improve but no doubt at some point
13:47all technologies right at some point they start with the high end and three but surely you can you can
13:53uh put the technology you know in uh in the other hand right so i could foresee it could be
14:01the same
14:01for such type of technology since talking to the two engineers i've had tons of hands-on time with
14:08the super strike and i must say i don't think they were overselling it the only real question i have
14:12now is how long it will take for the technology to spread to the gaming mouse market at large
14:17so what do you think will this change the market let us know in the comments below