 The eagle-eyed among you have probably seen this LTT mouse pad 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 mouse pads. 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. This video is brought to you by Ubico. The Ubiqui from Ubico is a cost-effective and easy-to-use two-factor authentication solution. Learn more about how to get $10 off yours at the link down below. [♪ music playing, [♪ music playing, [♪ music playing, 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 mousepads 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 mousepad, and then we're going to use the good old CNC router 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 mousepad, throw another one in, and it'll do its circles or whatever again. Only problem is I somehow 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 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. It 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 mousepad 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 Fanatic contacted us claiming to have made the world's most accurate mousepad, 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 mousepad, 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 mousepad 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-sized 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 Fanatec'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 Fanatec's 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 G Pro wireless. Running the test this way tells us two things. One, if Fanatec'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 Fanatec's 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 gonna 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've 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 mouse pad, 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 short circuit unboxing video over on our other channel. Big thanks to Ubico for sponsoring today's video. Ubico wants to make the internet safer for everyone. So they created the Ubiqui. It's a physical two-factor authentication key that helps you secure your online accounts. It doesn't require batteries or a mobile connection and it's both crush and IP68 water resistant. It works out of the box with hundreds of popular business and personal apps like Gmail, Twitter, cryptocurrency exchanges and password managers. And Ubiquis are super portable and work across tons of devices and operating systems like iOS, Android, Windows and Mac. It's time to take security seriously then. So go beyond basic authentication and get $10 off your Ubiqui 5 series today by going to the link in the video description and using code Linus10. All right, video's over. Smash that link in the description and get one 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.