Tong Family

Wow, this is one confusing mouse. I got it over the simple Apple Mouse for one reason, it has Qi charging in it, so you don’t have the flip the mouse over on its belly and charge it. Otherwise, it is pretty much a huge pain because it is targeted at the gaming community.

But some quick notes:

It is nearly impossible to tell the charge state. With the latest MacOS Monterey at least over Bluetooth, it reports its charge state. And it is constantly falling. I don’t know why as I have it on the Qi Charger all the time. I have the mouse pad with Qi charging built-in and that works incredibly well.

I was using the non-Qi charging mouse called the Corsair Dark Core RGB Pro without the SE, so you attach a little USB to the Qi charge connector and it looks ugly but it works. This one has the charging coil integrated right into the mouse. But it doesn’t seem to charge much. I think because I’m trying to charge it from the Mac and the Mac is powering the Qi down. Sigh. I may have to just plug it into the wall.

Telling the charge state of the mouse

I posted on this topic before for this Corsair but to review, you can only pair with one computer at a time, but if you have a new device, you have to turn off the mouse with the switch at the bottom and hold down the button behind the scroll wheel until it flashes blue. Solid blue means it is connected. Note it has a proprietary wireless connection (for more speed and real gamers which I don’t use 🙂

Millimeter positioning to get Qi to work and get slow blinks

And as that post mentioned, although there are a million lights on the Corsair MM1000, the key one is the status one between the scroll wheel and that top button. A slow pulse means it is getting a charge. With this thing, figuring out where the Qi charging coil is really difficult, it is towards the rear of the mouse and you just have to wiggle it to see.

Anyway, just plugging it into USB gives it 30% of charge in just a few minutes, so it makes me wonder why I bother with Qi charging. What I do notice is that it starts with a slow green flashing on the Qi charger which means charging, but then switches to fast green blinking, a slow one per the second blink means it is charging and two blinks per second mean it is not in an optimal position, so it is tricky to find the right spot. But if you get it into the right spot, both the green LED on top and the green LED on the mousepad should blink at the same one per second rate. Literally, a millimeter makes a difference.

There are no markers at all to tell you correct positioning, so a bit of chalk may help to line it all up 🙁 The good news is that if you can get it positioned right, you get literally a 20% charge in 5 minutes!

Turning off the light show

OK, I’m really puzzled by this, but if you brew install corsair-icue you get the configuration software and you have to plug, but the documentation for it is non-existent and it is a very mysterious system. But there appear to be two different things going on:

They’re a bunch of ratholes here. The first is that you need to be connected to USB as this whole configuration thing does not work on Bluetooth.

Then the application is confusing. When you start it you will see profiles on the left and the mouse, but this is not what it seems.

The confusing thing is that there are actually two kinds of “profiles” in the system. The stuff on the left is profiles that include lighting and everything else. There there are DPI profiles that are actually just to configure the DPI of the mouse, the key menus are in the middle next to the mouse. So for instance, if you click on Device Settings then the profiles go away and you configure the whole mouse.

Here are some of the settings and what you should do:

1. Go to Device Settings. As an aside it is tempting to turn off Brightness but don’t do it. If you do you will not see the Status light that tells you if it is charging nor will you see the profile lights on the left side which tell you which DPI Profile (see below you are using). So make sure Brightness is on and that you’ve turned off that silly battery icon if it is on.
2. Go to the upper right gear icon and turn of start icue on startup, you really don’t need it
3. To get rid of the flashy lights but retain the status and the profile lights, you have to actually create your down color profile. Go to Hardware LIghting and click on the + to create a Lighting Layer and then choose custom and then Static Color and then you will see on the right a default white. Just turn opacity to 0% and you are done.

I don’t really muck with the profile because they do about what you expect in the default. The lowest profile 1 is the least responsive, profile 3 is way too fast. So I normally leave it in the middle.

As a final aside, I’m pretty sure turning off the light show will make your mouse last longer 🙂

Saving the new Device Profile

The most confusing thing of all is how to actually save the configuration to the mouse. There is no obvious button for this at all! What you have to do is:

1. Go to the Device Settings
2. Scroll down to the then ONboard memory
3. You will see a set of profile that are assigned to slot
4. Click on the three vertical dots and there you will see Overwrite
5. You can tell if this works if the little disk icon on the main screen are filled it
6. Note that on the main left pane there is no way to actually save, you have to do it in this menu

Switching profiles

There is no way to do this by default profile you have to assign a special key or switch to this. You can also have a specific game start a specific profile. But if you set the profile to default in the main iCue menu, that is the one that the mouse will take. Sigh. How complicated!

iCue can hang the system

OK, the last thing is that this iCue thing is very flaky, I think it is getting confused with USB and it can cause your Mac to become completely unresponsive. So use if very sparingly and if you find your whole system hanging and the CPU is not pegged, then disconnect and kill iCue and start again. Good luck!!!!