Eight Directions of Gesture, and Nothing Installed on Your Computer

Ploopy has released the A+, the follow-up to its Adept trackball, covered this week by Yanko Design. The Adept's circuit board carried reserved space for two switches that never made it to production, and its base had slots for a wrist rest that never arrived. The A+ finishes both. Kits start at $99 CAD, and the design files, firmware, and assembly instructions are all on GitHub.

Button count goes from six to eight, two of which double as knobs handling high-resolution vertical and horizontal scrolling. Hold a button and flick the ball in any of eight directions and the device fires a command: cut, copy, paste, desktop switching, and media controls by default, all reprogrammable. There are two layers, one for navigation and one for control, and the control layer changes left-hand mode and scroll behavior on the device itself. Two small LEDs report which layer you are in, doing the job a tiny embedded screen would otherwise do. Underneath sits a Pixart PMW-3360 sensor polling at 1,000Hz and Omron D2LS-21 switches, with a 3D-printed shell the community can reprint in a different shape or color. The firmware is QMK, the open keyboard firmware also used in custom mechanical keyboards, which means every one of those behaviors lives in the trackball and not in a driver on your machine.

That placement is the whole argument. Firmware that sits on the device survives operating system updates, dropped driver support, and the company that shipped it. Nothing about the gestures cares what computer they are plugged into, or whether Ploopy is still around in 2036. Imagine buying a monitor, a keyboard, or a pair of headphones on the same terms, where the manual describes behavior rather than an app. What would you replace less often if the intelligence you paid for came in the box and stayed there?