3D printing and trackballs: the future of gadgets?

In episode two of our Vergecast "creators series," Alex Cranz talks with the creators of Ploopy, the open source trackball that has a dedicated fanbase on Reddit. Alex also talks with Chris Person, who recently wrote about Ploopy for The Verge, about how 3D printing and online communities are creating opportunities for gadget enthusiasts. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Speaker 00

  This episode is brought to you by On Investing, an original podcast from Charles Schwab. Each week, hosts Lizanne Saunders, Schwab's Chief Investment Strategist, and Colin Martin, Head of Fixed Income Research and Strategy for the Schwab Center for Financial Research, bring you fresh insights on what's happening in the markets and why, and what the implications might be for your portfolio. Join Colin and Lizanne as they explore questions like, how do you evaluate corporate bonds that look interesting? And what sectors are on the move right now? Download the latest episode and subscribe at schwab.com/oninvesting or wherever you get your podcasts.

• 0:45Nilay Patel?

  Hey everybody, it's Nick from The Vergecast. On Tuesdays this month, we're doing some extra episodes that are focused on creators, our favorite. And in true Vergecast fashion, it's the nerdiest creators we can find. Last week, Alex Krantz talked to people building mechanical keyboards. Alex is here. What's up, Alex?

• 1:00Alex Cranz?

  Hey, what's up?

• 1:01Nilay Patel?

  What nerds did you find me for this week's episode?

• 1:03Alex Cranz?

  So this week, we're going full nerd. I mean, we've already been going full nerd, but we're going to be talking trackballs, which I think is like niche of niche. Like, there are people who really care about gaming mice, but there are even fewer of us who care about trackballs. And I went and found some guys and they created their own company to 3D print trackballs. It's called Ploopy, and they've got like a big vibrant community on Reddit where people are like doing all these crazy mods and stuff. And we're going to talk to them about Ploopy.

• 1:30Nilay Patel?

  Alex, why is it called Ploopy?

• 1:31Alex Cranz?

  I'm not gonna, I'm not gonna spoil it. You're gonna have to listen. It's great.

• 1:34Nilay Patel?

  All right, let's do it. Take it away, Alex.

• 1:40Alex Cranz?

  You know how you maybe have a mouse or a game controller and you absolutely love it? You adore the thing, but sometimes you look at it and you wonder, what if the mouse fit your hand better? Or the triggers on the back of the controller were longer? There's just a little tweak you want to make. With most gadgets, that requires some heavy-duty modding, some voiding warranties, and a big hunt to find other people trying to do what you're trying to do. The idea behind Ploopy, a company that makes 3D-printed trackballs, is kind of what if the community and the modding was built right in?

• 2:12Alex Cranz?

  I first heard about Ploopy from a fellow trackball nerd, and I was immediately hooked on the concept. Most trackballs nowadays stick to a handful of tried and true designs and are made by companies like Logitech and Kensington. There hasn't been a lot of innovation in this space, and it's felt for years like all the experimentation with form and design stopped in 1997.

• 2:32Alex Cranz?

  But Ploopy actively encourages people to come up with their own designs and mods and weird ideas, and they all share them with each other on a pretty active subreddit. I'm going to talk to someone from that subreddit later, but first, I want to talk to brothers Colin and Phil Lamb.

• 2:47Speaker 03

  My name's Colin, and I'm on the call with Phil, my partner and my brother, and I'm one of the co-founders of Ploopy, Ploopy Corporation.

• 2:54Speaker 04

  Hi, my name is Phil. I'm also one of the co-founders of Ploopy.

• 2:57Alex Cranz?

  And yes, they can explain why it's called that. So let's get right into our interview.

• 3:06Speaker 03

  So originally, my brother and I were just spitballing about what kinds of names we wanted to have for the company. Before this, the companies that the two of us were running had very serious names and very ridiculous offerings. And we thought, you know, maybe like if we switch it up and we have a silly name, it'll help sharpen our focus and give us a little bit of direction. And it just so happened that we were kicking around a couple of names one day, and the name came up, and we loved it so much that we decided to stick with it.

• 3:40Alex Cranz?

  Is this the first trackball you guys had worked on together?

• 3:43Speaker 03

  Yeah, Phil was actually the one who came up with the idea originally.

• 3:47Speaker 04

  I think it's like, we grew up in the 90s, right? And I accidentally walked into an Office Depot when I was like 14 or 15, and I came out of that store with one of these, with one of the originals, right? The Microsoft Trackball Explorer. And it turns out there's an entire community of people that just remember this thing very fondly, because honestly, it's a magical piece of equipment. I think when we were talking about something new to do, it was just the project that I had kicking around in my head. I was like, well, I had two of these, I broke both of them. Boy, I wish that I could just have another one.

• 4:17Speaker 03

  And I bet you there's lots of people out there that feel the same way.

• 4:20Alex Cranz?

  You are 100% right. I'm one of those people. I like, I had my trackballs when like, I was really big into the Logitech Thumb Ball. And when they started like reducing the number of trackballs they were making in the late 2000s, I like went out and bought a bunch and had like, I was like, I gotta stock up, which is like a very weird thing to do. And when my friend hit me up and was like, hey, have you heard of Ploopy? I was immediately like, oh my God, this is the best idea ever. Like, just lost my mind. I was like, you're gonna write a story for us about this? Like, I like, I have to know everything I can about Ploopy. So it sounds like, was that initial Ploopy kind of modeled after that, that Microsoft?

• 4:59Speaker 03

  I think the key idea was, there are so many companies that are out there, they make something, especially if it's something that you use every day, like a keyboard or a mouse, or a set of headphones, or something like that. And then, for whatever reason, these companies stopped supporting it. Maybe it's not profitable anymore. Maybe they can't get the parts anymore. But these are gadgets that people get really attached to, and they get really used to them. And then all of a sudden, they're gone, they're not available anymore. And it really sucks when that happens. I think everybody has experienced something like that, something that they really enjoy, and all of a sudden, it's gone. And I think one of the key drivers behind what we were doing, especially with open sourcing everything, was it doesn't matter if we stop making this thing. This thing's always going to be available. This thing is always going, it's always gonna be possible to make this thing. And it's not

• 5:42Speaker 03

  gonna be hugely expensive. It's not gonna require $50,000 to make an injection mold or anything like that. It's always gonna be available. I think that was really the key driver behind why we were going with it in that direction to begin with.

• 5:55Alex Cranz?

  I think what's really also kind of cool about this is that you have a lot of different types there. Because trackballs were so unique for such a long period of time. There were so many different form factors. And as things kind of like drilled down, suddenly we had like, the Logitech Thumb Ball, and the Kensington Giant Ball. And, and that was kind of it.

• 6:14Speaker 03

  Yeah, it was funny. The core technology behind all of them is roughly the same. There's some differences in the sensors, like QMK, huge thing in the keyboard space. It's not a thing in the mouse space or the trackball space or anything like that. And like just a couple of developers from QMK reached out to us when they figured out what microcontroller we were using and what technology we were using. And that kind of helped make everything more modular, like moving from the classic, which is the original one that we released, into the nano, which is only a ball. Like, there's no buttons on it at all. It's only a ball. Moving and porting everything over was really, really straightforward. So it's really easy to create new form factors and new input types.

• 6:57Speaker 04

  People are really responding to the sort of philosophy behind the original product. And and one of the things about running an open source company is that people are really, really eager to give you feedback. And we're also very accessible on Reddit. And people are just not afraid to tell you what they think. And, you know, just for a while, what we were hearing was, this is great, but I wish it was this. And this is great, but I wish it was this. Every once in a while, enough people would kind of pile up, kind of saying the same thing that we said, all right, well, let's see what happens when we when we actually do it, right? And and that's how we ended up with what we have today, because mostly just people were like, we want that. We're like, all right, cool. We can make it.

• 7:36Alex Cranz?

  So for trackballs, it was this one thing you'd always loved. Was there ever the idea that you might do something else besides trackballs with Poopie?

• 7:44Speaker 03

  I think so, yeah. The idea was always to stick with open source. It was always going to be available. There was always going to be options for customization. There was always going to be a community aspect around it, especially, you know, trying to get other people involved, developing new features and just making it accessible. And one of the things that we're working on right now is the headphones project.

• 8:01Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 8:02Speaker 03

  And we've just explored like a couple of different ideas in the past, some not really so successful and some that are really capturing our attention right now. So we always knew we were going to go beyond trackballs. I guess we just didn't realize that we would spend, because it's been over two years where we focused pretty much primarily on trackballs and input devices, so.

• 8:20Alex Cranz?

  I honestly find it fascinating because I think when keyboards really started to develop as this kind of open source project that people were working on, that made sense to me because it's relatively, relatively, I'm not designing my own keyboard anytime soon, simple, there's, you know, there's a PCB, there's, there's switches, it's, it's all pretty standard. But with, with trackballs, you have a lot of additional complexities there. You have to track this ball, you've got these optical sensors, like, that just seemed like a lot of extra work for you guys.

• 8:51Speaker 04

  The complexity is kind of a blessing and a curse, right? In the sense that it's actually the, one of the most complicated things about the design work is making everything fit together, right? As you say, a keyboard is a linear array of switches and it's almost, I don't want to say, I don't want to oversimplify it, but it's, you know, it's a box and you jam some switches inside.

• 9:09Alex Cranz?

  I can build a keyboard very easily. I have my ploopy and have not yet built it.

• 9:14Speaker 04

  And, you know, designing a mouse, all the components are sort of meant to be used in a context where you have control over the, over the mechanisms down to the, like, kind of micron level, right? People expect injection molded parts to be very accurate. And so in the context where we're building something that anybody can, you know, kind of spread out on their desk and put together and we can 3D print or they can 3D print for that. Because all of our designs are designed in such a way that you should be able to just kind of use a sort of a bog standard 3D printer to produce the stuff. There's the whole idea behind replicating it. Why would we make it special to our, like, super cool, amazing, secret print farm? But that means that there's an extended design process to make sure that all these technologies that are normally designed for a sort of a high precision environment fit into this more kind of loose set of, of manufacturing technologies.

• 9:58Speaker 03

  I remember kind of early on in the design process, Phil would send me a bunch of stills, because we have, we're not co-located, we're located different spaces, and he would send me a bunch of stills and he would say, "Print these. This is the final version of the classic. It's definitely going to work." And before they would even come off the print bed, he would have new still files for me because the, the design process just required so much iteration to get everything precise and get everything right. So, it's challenging. It's challenging work for sure, just to make sure everything fits together.

• 10:27Alex Cranz?

  Yeah. Well, I know some people, a friend, we were talking to him for the podcast even, have done a lot of 3D printing with the really, the small one that's just the ball. But, but these other ones that are, have to need a little bit more precision. Have you seen a lot of like iteration from Poopie users? Like making their own 3D designs for these things with four buttons on them and a scroll wheel?

• 10:51Speaker 03

  Not so much additional buttons, but the one that stands out to me is there was a designer working out of the UK and he came up with a design that used our, all of our trackball designs use roller bearings. They kind of have some drawbacks. They're noisy. They can wiggle around. I think that they work great, especially with the balls that we ship, but this designer was not super, super happy with them. So he put in a new kind of bearing called a ball transfer unit, which has no theoretical resistance in any direction. They're supposed to roll forever, basically. And he basically redid the design for the entire top shell, right from the ground up, including these ball transfer units. And

• 11:32Speaker 03

  that's probably the, the biggest amount of rework that I've seen done on it. And it's really very different.

• 11:38Alex Cranz?

  Do you think you're gonna see more of that? Like more people kind of, as Poopie grows in popularity, hopefully?

• 11:45Speaker 03

  I hope so.

• 11:45Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 11:46Speaker 03

  As well on the software side, the software side actually is where it really, really took off.

• 11:50Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 11:50Speaker 03

  Because for a while there, we were the only ones who were involved in, in writing firmware for it and making sure that it was accessible. And then as soon as the developers from Q and K got involved, it was, it was like watching a monster transform to life because I don't think we were involved at all.

• 12:05Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 12:06Speaker 03

  Apart from just chipping into, into the code every once in a while or doing, answering a few questions. But that was really amazing to see just how the community took that forward.

• 12:16Speaker 04

  There's all sorts of weird stuff, right? There's, you can, you can scroll with, with the ball and then there was a, somebody ported it to this, there's this thing on, on Q and K called VIA.

• 12:25Speaker 03

  Yep.

• 12:25Speaker 04

  Which allows you to remap buttons without having to reprogram the device. And so somebody went and did that. Now you can remap all the buttons on every Poopie product. I guess the ones that have it, because the Nano doesn't have any buttons.

• 12:35Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 12:36Speaker 04

  There's a bunch of other, oh, somebody like did something to the scroll wheel where it made it more.

• 12:41Speaker 03

  They added detents to it.

• 12:42Speaker 04

  Yeah. Cause all our scroll wheels, they're smooth.

• 12:44Alex Cranz?

  And so this gives like the little notches?

• 12:46Speaker 03

  Yeah, exactly.

• 12:47Speaker 04

  That one involved the use of a paperclip, a very creative use of a paperclip. I was extremely impressed.

• 12:51Speaker 03

  That was something. Yeah, the thing we were always hoping for was by making everything as accessible as we possibly could, then if anyone ever saw a need, they would fix it and they would open source it themselves. I saw someone who wanted to put in, normally the ball that we ship with is 1.75 inches for the Classic, and they wanted to use a Trackball Explorer ball. I don't know why, but they wanted to use one. And it's 1.818 inches, and they redesigned the entire top just to accommodate that ball and open sourced it. And it's available, like you can, you can print it right now if you want. So really amazing to see.

• 13:25Alex Cranz?

  That's very, very cool. We talked a little bit about the community. It sounds like, Poopy, I'm never gonna get, stop like giggling when I say Poopy. I'm so sorry.

• 13:35Speaker 03

  You know what? It fills my heart with joy every time someone laughs at the name. I love it.

• 13:39Alex Cranz?

  Where is your community? Is it primarily on Reddit? Is it on Discord?

• 13:43Speaker 03

  It's primarily on Reddit. It's just been a place that's been really welcoming. Truth be told, there has been some feedback that has not been helpful, but it's balanced by the unbelievable wealth of, of knowledge and experience that people bring. And it's, it's definitely pushed everything forward. We'd never would have gotten involved with QMK if we hadn't been on Reddit. And it's just been, it's, it's been really incredible.

• 14:04Alex Cranz?

  Was Reddit and, and, and being there and developing that community always kind of part of the plan?

• 14:08Speaker 03

  I wouldn't say it was part of the plan. It kind of happened by accident. I think Phil was working on the top for the Classic. This is maybe two or three months after we decided to team up and he just showed it to me and I thought it looked amazing. And I said, you know what? I'm, I'm just gonna post this picture on Reddit. I know that there's a Trackball subreddit. I'm just gonna post it there.

• 14:24Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 14:25Speaker 03

  And there wasn't really any thought or plan behind it. And I did, and people were really excited about it. And we just kept bringing more news and, and more developments to Reddit. And the more that it happened, the more excited people got. So, yeah, it just kind of happened organically.

• 14:39Speaker 04

  We do, like, we do new product design essentially, I don't want to say on Reddit, but more or less on Reddit, you know? And I think that's, that's something we do that not really anyone else, I don't see anyone else doing that. You know, I've got piles of half-finished designs just kind of sitting here and we put them on Reddit. And as Colin said, we get a ton of feedback and it's really helpful because people tell you what they want.

• 15:00Speaker 03

  And they tell you what they do not like.

• 15:03Alex Cranz?

  What's something that they truly do not like?

• 15:05Speaker 03

  So a lot of the feedback that we're getting more recently is on our headphones. So that's kind of what's top of mind. We frequently post a frequency response. It's as close as you can get to a digitization of how the headphones sound without actually putting them on your head, right? People are pretty picky about that one. They're like, I don't like, I don't like this part or this part seems not that good.

• 15:24Alex Cranz?

  People have very strong feelings about frequency response curves.

• 15:28Speaker 03

  They do. But you know what? It's, it's been helping us focus on the sorts of things to try and push ahead a little bit further.

• 15:33Speaker 04

  One of the things that sticks out to me from trackballs is, so some of the things we make, we make a left-handed version.

• 15:39Alex Cranz?

  Yes.

• 15:40Speaker 04

  Not all of them, but some of them. And that vacuum, that kind of time before there were left-handed options, people hated that. They hated that with a passion. Just the sort of like, lack of left-handed option was just this thing that people really got stuck on.

• 15:54Alex Cranz?

  Do you guys think about these bigger companies and stuff that are still in the trackball space? Like, have you heard responses from them? Do you think about like, how your products may like, make them do things differently?

• 16:07Speaker 03

  Almost never. We're, we're so small compared to the other, I mean, I think we ship in a year what Logitech ships every like, 25 minutes or something like that. So.

• 16:19Speaker 04

  I think it's less than that. It's like five minutes.

• 16:21Speaker 03

  Maybe five minutes.

• 16:22Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 16:22Speaker 03

  Yeah. I would be very flattered if Kensington decided that they needed to alter their business strategy because of what we were doing. Somehow, I don't think there are any executives losing sleep over there because of what we've done.

• 16:35Alex Cranz?

  I, I mean, I think it is interesting that for the most part, the trackball space hasn't had a lot of movement, it hasn't had a lot of innovation. So like, you guys are, are kind of pushing this space forward in that respect and that you're saying, hey, there's still an audience here, there's still people who care about this and make it cooler, make new things.

• 16:52Speaker 03

  Yeah. I think, especially with the way that we've positioned everything, you know, trying to make it open source and, and using licenses that are really friendly for open source. It'd be really awkward, I think, for, for a more traditional company to come in and, and.

• 17:08Alex Cranz?

  Start printing your designs.

• 17:10Speaker 03

  Yeah, especially with the way that they're designed and everything, they're not at all designed for traditional manufacturing.

• 17:15Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 17:15Speaker 03

  If a larger company were to come in and start doing similar things, I think that it would only be beneficial for people who are using trackballs. It would mean that there'd be more offerings on the table. And like you said, you know, there's, there hasn't been much innovation going on in the last little while. So maybe there's still room for, for new developments to be made.

• 17:32Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, no, it was just, it was nice to see like, oh, somebody's actually willing to like, think about this and think about how maybe the way we interact with our computers can be different.

• 17:42Speaker 03

  Yeah, I think kind of the, the real leap towards something really new, it was Phil who originally was, he pitched me the idea for the Nano and he said, we have to do this. There's just no alternative. We have to do it. I'll be perfectly honest. I didn't understand how it could possibly be beneficial because it has no buttons, right? It's just a ball. It's only a ball. And by far, it's our most popular kit. They're flying off the shelves. So.

• 18:06Speaker 04

  But that's a fantastic example of kind of being on Reddit and seeing the community develop because I don't want to say that you could just kind of look at a post history in a subreddit and just kind of come away with the conclusion that this was a good idea because I don't think either of us had that feeling. It was more of an experiment. But it's very much like we're, we're close to the people who, who love our products. And sometimes we can kind of get a sense for what they need before they need it. And I don't want to go full Steve Jobs on this and be like, retail users, what they like. But there's very much like, there's a lot of value in being deeply connected to the people who love your products. And we're really fortunate to have that.

• 18:49Alex Cranz?

  I think what Colin and Phil really impressed on me, more than anything else, is that the community is driving the company as much as them. After the break, I'm going to talk with Chris Person, a very active member of that community who has made a trackball based around a pool cue ball and is currently trying to make a trackball with a steel ball bearing instead of a more traditional plastic ball. He's also the guy who introduced me to Ploopy to begin with. So stay tuned.

• 19:20Speaker 00

  This episode is brought to you by On Investing, an original podcast from Charles Schwab. Each week, hosts Lizanne Saunders, Schwab's Chief Investment Strategist, and Colin Martin, Head of Fixed Income Research and Strategy for the Schwab Center for Financial Research, bring you fresh insights on what's happening in the markets and why, and what the implications might be for your portfolio. Join Colin and Lizanne as they explore questions like, how do you evaluate corporate bonds that look interesting? And what sectors are on the move right now? Download the latest episode and subscribe at schwab.com/oninvesting or wherever you get your podcasts.

• 20:12Alex Cranz?

  Hey, we're back. I think I mentioned this before on The Vergecast, but the reason I went and bought a Ploopy is because my friend Chris Person slid into my Twitter DMs to talk about his own build. Naturally, I had to beg him to write about Ploopy for The Verge, and he did. And when he isn't in my DMs, Chris runs the YouTube channel Highlight Reels, which finds and highlights the weirdest clips from video games.

• 20:32Speaker 05

  This is Highlight Reel for May 5, 2022, and we're here to show you some of the best recent clips from around the gaming world.

• 20:38Alex Cranz?

  He felt like the right person to talk to because Chris is super active in the Ploopy community. He understands the appeal, but he's also just been out there building these things, and he's collaborating with other community members. And he's 3D printing a whole lot of plastic. Let's talk to Chris.

• 20:58Alex Cranz?

  I was kind of excited to talk to you about this because the first time I heard about Ploopy and about building your own trackball was you descending into my DMs on Twitter and being like, "Hey, Cranz, look at this cool thing I found. Look what I'm doing right now." Like, do you remember just assaulting my DMs with it?

• 21:17Speaker 05

  Okay, you're like one of four people I do that to. Not to make you feel less special, but like there's some, but no, no, I do remember doing that. I think I thought it was funny at first because it was like called Ploopy. And it's like, hey, check it out, Ploopy. I'm not a trackball person initially, like I'm not one of those people who's just like really deep into using it as my primary interface. But it's fascinating because like in the nineties, it like kind of was pretty prevalent in a way that it simply isn't now.

• 21:43Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 21:44Speaker 05

  You know what I mean? Like you, you could see trackballs, like there were normal people with trackballs. It wasn't just this thing that like weirdos had all the time.

• 21:51Alex Cranz?

  And now it's absolutely the weirdos. Like I say, this is a trackball weirdo. Like I have suffered for years because I love trackballs and I'm one of the few people I know that loves them and I will defend them to the death. And you popped into my DMs and was like, hey, look at this cool trackball. And I was like, oh no, I have a problem.

• 22:09Speaker 05

  Well, that's the thing is like, to give a little background on what Ploopy's deal is, I think you need a little bit of context on keyboards, not too much.

• 22:15Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 22:15Speaker 05

  But like the deal on like keyboard stuff recently is that like, you know, okay, yeah, people love mechanical keyboards, they love clicky things, they love silent ones, yada, yada, yada. But like when you get down to it, what really became the thing was that you could do open source firmware. So you could just remap your keys, you can do macros, you can do layers, which is really, really interesting. And you could, you just need less keys to do the same thing.

• 22:38Alex Cranz?

  Right.

• 22:39Speaker 05

  And with less movement. And so as time has gone on, the adaptability of not just one firmware like QMK, which is the, the kind of the standard, but like other ones like ZMK, but like various ones to like, you know, get it to work on Bluetooth and stuff like that. All these open source things that make it so you can do all this stuff without installing a bunch of dumb crap on your computer and so that it can work on the, on the processor and like not have to like be tethered to a specific device.

• 23:05Alex Cranz?

  Right.

• 23:05Speaker 05

  And so taking that philosophy and then like going into the like pointing space and being like, okay, but what if you did that for a pointing device? Ploopy makes like a mouse, they make a thumb ball, they make all these different things. And what got me into the idea that I could just make this, first was like my friend being like, oh, people make modifications to their Ploopy. That's, that was the first thing.

• 23:26Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 23:27Speaker 05

  Oh yeah, he's like. I got a 3D printer. We can just print this. And you can add what's called a BT or ball transfer unit.

• 23:33Alex Cranz?

  That's like the little balls that support the big track ball and roll across each other.

• 23:39Speaker 05

  It's a silly name for something that's basically like a cylinder with a bunch of ball bearings in it, holding up one ball bearing, making it so it can rotate really smoothly. And then you can put the track ball you have on them. So somebody made a mod for that and I was like, oh, that's pretty cool. My friend 3D printed that out to me. We were getting really into it, you know, oh, you know, you can strip out the lube and put new lubrication in, you know, all this sort of stuff.

• 24:02Alex Cranz?

  Customize the crap out of it.

• 24:03Speaker 05

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. So basically it's like, I got this, this little track ball. They make one called the Nano, which is the smallest one. And that was the thing that I think was like, okay, goddamn, I gotta get this. Because it is like $40 Canadian, 45, so it's really cheap for what you're getting, you know? And then it fits right in between the middle of, I'm one of these people with like a split keyboard. So it makes it so that I have this like little tiny pointing device for doing little tiny things, thinking so I don't have to reach over to my mouse every time. And then from there, I got that, really liked it, got way more use out of it, did the modification. And while I was still doing the modification stuff, found out about this guy named Jefador. He did this thing where he created his own platform, his own like PCB for something similar. And then just prototyped a bunch of them.

• 24:48Speaker 05

  And at this point, I had already gotten into the fact that you can just go to JCL PCB and like all PCB and these like PCB any manufacturers.

• 24:57Alex Cranz?

  And just order a PCB.

• 24:59Speaker 05

  And just order stuff that like people put on GitHub.

• 25:02Alex Cranz?

  Like, do you have to solder it yourself when you get it? Or do you just like, it comes to you soldered?

• 25:06Speaker 05

  What you can do is you can upload like the bill of materials and then what's called a component placement file, a component placement list, rather, and they'll just like do it for you. It's going to cost you more money. I think I could have like five of them for 30 bucks and then gave them to a bunch of people. I screwed up though, because I didn't recognize, because I missed a couple of parts and it added a whole extra journey to it. But yeah, no, it's actually pretty easy, as long as you have the files, as long as you kind of know what you're doing, to just get a circuit board printed out. As long as it's open source, as long as they have the parts, you're fine.

• 25:36Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, I don't even know how to like start there because I'm still, I haven't really soldered. Poopy is going to be my first big project. I got very excited when you, when you sent all of this to me because while you don't like trackballs until this moment, I've always loved them. I was very upset when everybody, for a long time, kind of Logitech and other trackball makers, Kensington, kind of shied away from the space.

• 25:59Speaker 05

  Mm-hmm.

• 26:00Alex Cranz?

  And everything they were doing was either really focused on graphic artists and these big professionals and not to people who were just like using it to play video games and fart around on the internet. And they all moved away from that. And I was like, oh, no, what am I gonna like, there was one manufacturer, it was just Logitech, making a thumb trackball. And I was like, what am I gonna do with my life?

• 26:19Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 26:19Alex Cranz?

  I went and bought like four of them so that I wouldn't have to worry about them. And now like, we're starting to see trackballs become a thing again. And Poopy is maybe not at the forefront of it because it's, you know, this big open source project, but it's really like providing these cool opportunities and these cool just like designs that I wouldn't even think of. Like, that's what I, I went and spent so much money on Poopy just because I was like, oh, I've never even thought of using this design. I wonder what this is like. And it's cheap.

• 26:45Speaker 05

  There's other projects like this that had done it before. Like, there's one called The Oddball that's a 3D printed, integrated.

• 26:51Alex Cranz?

  Trackball?

• 26:52Speaker 05

  Yeah, yeah. It's a trackball inside a keyboard. It's a split keyboard. If you look up The Oddball keyboard, the person like printed it out, sanded it, cryloxed it, primer, all that stuff like that. And then they printed out their own PCB that's just using like, I think, 5 volt logic or something like that. And it's pretty straightforward. It works within integrated MCU and stuff like that. But the thing is like, it's a combination of two things. One, it's the idea that technology isn't fun. You know what I mean?

• 27:16Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 27:16Speaker 05

  Like, there's a lot of joy that has been taken out of using the computer. Being on the computer sucks a lot of the time.

• 27:21Alex Cranz?

  Yes.

• 27:22Speaker 05

  And so, what can I do to make this mine? What can I do to really interact with it in a way that hasn't been since like Radio Shack days?

• 27:31Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 27:31Speaker 05

  To demystify the process between what's between me and the computer even more, but also the realization that stuff is really cheap on AliExpress. Like, if I wanted to, you know, you could disassemble your mouse, de-solder the mouse clicks, and then put new, better micro Which is in there, you know what I mean? And that's not a difficult thing. I was talking with somebody on a Discord server I'm on, who made a board called The Chunky, which uses two Cirque Trackpads, which are the trackpads that the Steam controller uses. And it's like, okay, yeah, now you can use like dual touchpads on this and like weird rotary encoders. It's just in like the ways in which you can just get granular with like, you know, exactly how you want to use this. And you know, you're still just talking to the computer,

• 28:14Speaker 05

  but it's also that and like the fact that I never want to install Razer synapse ever again, if I can avoid it.

• 28:20Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, I think that's like a really interesting part of this because I got a Mac Studio. Listeners will know this, we've talked about it a bunch. But I got this Mac Studio, I love it. It restarts itself every day for some unknown reason that I'm hoping will sort itself out. And every single time, the Logitech software pops up because that's a trackball I use. And it's like, hey, do you want to go change some preferences in Logitech? And I'm like, no, if I didn't do it the last 12 times it's restarted this week, why would I do it today? And Logitech, Razer, they're all like trying to get in front of your eyeballs all the time. So I guess they think, well, let's put really obnoxious software on people's computers. And these keyboard makers and trackball makers are saying, wait, actually, that's bad.

• 29:04Alex Cranz?

  Let's stop that, just use the device.

• 29:07Speaker 05

  I think the first one of them that figures out that there's a market for that, if any of them do,

• 29:11Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 29:12Speaker 05

  would be SMART.

• 29:13Alex Cranz?

  Yes.

• 29:13Speaker 05

  But I don't necessarily know if they are. It's not within their interest to do that. And it's a really minor community of people who would be like, I really want to edit the text file on this firmware to like be able to like change the acceleration curve on how this or give it an acceleration curve. You know, that's a very minor group of people.

• 29:32Alex Cranz?

  Well, you say it's minor, but you've talked a lot about these Discord groups and these Reddit groups where there's a lot of people doing this and really interested in it. You know, the Mechanical Keyboard Reddit started when I joined it in like 2012, 2013 or something. It was a few thousand people and now it's over a million. And I think we all kind of underestimate that market and that interest because there's just not a lot of easily accessible products that feed that. But I do want to kind of poke at you and Discord and Reddit. You and I are both on those boards. I am absolutely a lurker, you're much more active in it. How much of Reddit fuels this, this kind of hobby for you?

• 30:11Speaker 05

  It's a little bit of that and a little bit of like asking around on Discord. I think the Discord element is a little, because like I'm in a bunch of them and I'm, I think I got everyone in this one Discord I'm in, the Absolym Ergogen one. Ergogen's a project that makes it so it's easier to quickly prototype keyboard by storing it all as W Y A M L code.

• 30:32Alex Cranz?

  Okay.

• 30:33Speaker 05

  So it makes it easy to be like, oh, I want to change, move that column down and then it just generates the PCB.

• 30:37Alex Cranz?

  That's dope.

• 30:37Speaker 05

  By changing a few easy to read parameters that anybody can do. I just kept talking about trackballs and now like a lot of them are more trackball people, but one of them has definitely had, already had like five Ploopies.

• 30:48Alex Cranz?

  It's just the two of you and like your own little smaller Discord.

• 30:51Speaker 05

  It's a small place, you know what I mean? It's actually pretty small. I think a lot of, there's a lot of lurkers.

• 30:55Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 30:55Speaker 05

  The people that post, it's not that many people. After I posted the article, like three different people DM me and they're like, okay, can you please like, do you have any of those? Do you have any of those PCBs? Can you send them to me? Is it okay if I get, you know? And I was just like, man, you can just do it yourself. And I know, one thing I will say is also like recently Raspberry Pi put out the Pico and the RP 2040, which is a microprocessor, very, very powerful and very cheap importantly.

• 31:20Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 31:20Speaker 05

  And the keyboard community is like still trying to wrap their head around it, but you're literally seeing like people who do this in their spare time, like on these Discords, like talking about, hey, if anyone, does anyone want to mess around with this? And then asking problems like, there was a big, long conversation today in one of the, one of the Discords I was in about like Kale's pseudo monopoly over low profile switches and how like, well, maybe what about Gator on, you know, and stuff like that. And so people are always like tinkering around and you actually see it pretty iteratively. You see it a little more like the results on Reddit, but in the comments and then in Discord, you actually see the process a little bit more. And I think it's really interesting because it's like, yeah, I feel like I just joined one of these.

• 31:56Alex Cranz?

  You know, it's really interesting because of all the times we think about social media and we think primarily like YouTube or Twitter or even Twitch as these places that are developing fandoms, developing these communities. And we don't think as much about Reddit, except for when we're talking about like the Donald, you know, sub, but Discord too, it sounds like is really becoming this place where people are gathering and talking about these things and communing in a way that we haven't like seen in a while. Is that right?

• 32:24Speaker 05

  Telegram too.

• 32:25Alex Cranz?

  Telegram, yeah.

• 32:26Speaker 05

  Because a lot of those guys are Russian or Eastern European and they're just like, love talking about that stuff on there, you know what I mean? I'm not a Telegram person, nor do I intend to be, but yeah.

• 32:35Alex Cranz?

  And you found Poopy through Discord, through a friend on Discord. Or no?

• 32:40Speaker 05

  I found Ploopy through looking up trackballs, I think, on Reddit. And then like, I ended up talking to people on Discords and stuff like that. And the JFidder stuff was like, one of my friends who helped me 3D print out the thing.

• 32:54Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 32:54Speaker 05

  And that's the other thing is that 3D printing got way easier. I used to look at 3D printing as this thing that like, because not only did I do the Ploopy, I did this other second trackball using the JFidder ones to two-button one. It has a full, like, I got a black cue ball.

• 33:07Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 33:08Speaker 05

  Like an Amaranth one.

• 33:09Alex Cranz?

  It's enormous.

• 33:10Speaker 05

  It's enormous. It's a really big trackball. I usually don't use it that much just because it's like, it's too big. And because I haven't found a way to do a BTU mod on it. But, you know, 3D printing not only got cheaper, you can now just like, do it online. Like, the other day, somebody uploaded a bunch of like, weird sculpted keycaps.

• 33:25Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 33:26Speaker 05

  That they printed out in resin, so they look like teeth. And they're like, oh yeah, I just got a printing service to print it for me. And I'm like, alright, I'm gonna get that printed out in nylon. So I'm getting these keycaps that are meant for low-profile keyboards, printed out in like, I think it's, what is it, like, N11, P11? I forget what it's called, but it's this like, scratchy, weird, sandpapery nylon. That's a process called MGF printing. And you can just get this stuff sent to you. Like, you don't need to like, buy a Prusa or like, one of these 3D printers. You just either have to have a friend who has it, or you don't mind like, going online to like, a service that'll do it, or cut acrylic for you.

• 34:04Alex Cranz?

  Well, I'm kind of curious about that, because my assumption with 3D printing a lot of times was, there was a certain amount of talent and experience to getting it to do, go right, right? Like, you have to print it just so, and then you have to like, make sure you remove it so it doesn't break. Do you find yourself having to go and reprint things that you do through a service?

• 34:23Speaker 05

  In this case, this is the first time I've used Craft Cloud, I think is the name of it. I think all three Ps, the company that owns them. And they're like, a front-end for like, several printing services. So it's like, a comparison shopper. In the case of the ones that I had, a friend of mine who printed it out and knew what a good print looks like, did it. So that was, there was that element of it. But in this case, you could just shop around for like, you know, SLA resin printing or whatever, stuff like that. I was pricing out- How much it would cost to print something out in titanium? Not as much as you would think. I think a space bar is like 130 bucks. But yeah, I don't know. I guess the point is what was nif because of the access to the tools is increasingly less so.

• 35:04Speaker 05

  And I think that the saturation for things like 3D printing and the saturation for things like laser cutters, those things are getting such that like it's really, really easy to do.

• 35:15Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 35:16Speaker 05

  And like other people have already done a lot of the work. And that's something I'd like to stress. Like I'm working on a board right now, but like all this stuff is stuff that other people made.

• 35:23Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 35:23Speaker 05

  And that I was just like, oh, I could just get that printed out. What if I did that, but I did it in a different color? And that's the thing is people are just like, they don't want money. I mean, sometimes they want money for it and obviously pay them if they, if they, you know, if they, but if they, it's open source and they'll like go to town. They're pretty nice about it because this is just their hobby.

• 35:39Alex Cranz?

  Yeah. Well, like the Poopy guys, they just print it out like in their home or whatever and send it to you. I ordered it and like said, these are the colors I want. And one day I just got it all in like just a regular Ziploc bag. Nothing fancy, like in a box wrapped in some like Canadian newspaper. And it was great. And I was just like, oh, this is just like some person who really just like digs trackballs like I do. And that's, it's a nice feeling.

• 36:04Speaker 05

  But that's the thing, you actually see the people who run these shops that you've like know.

• 36:07Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 36:07Speaker 05

  Like in Discord, you're like, oh, that's the guy who writes, uh, who runs the MK Ultra. It's the name of the low profile keyboard store.

• 36:13Alex Cranz?

  I mean, that's the way I felt when I saw you drop your trackball in the trackball subreddit. I was like, oh, hey, I know that guy. It was nice. It was a nice feeling.

• 36:22Speaker 05

  It's a series of, hey, I know that guys and like, and, and they're really nice. And like, you know, just don't be a dick.

• 36:30Speaker 05

  Pretty straightforward.

• 36:31Alex Cranz?

  A motto we should always all live by. Well, thank you, Chris, for, for chatting with us about Ploopy and about trackballs and 3D printing and subreddits and Discord. I mean, we just covered everything today, so that was really awesome.

• 36:44Speaker 05

  It was nice. Thank you. It was nice talking to you.

• 36:51Alex Cranz?

  I want to thank Phil and Colin and Chris again for talking to me on the show. And I want to thank you for listening. I think a lot of the time here at The Verge, and just in the gadget community in general, we get hung up on what big companies like Apple or Logitech, I mean, heck, even Kensington, are doing. These are the companies building the devices we interact with daily. But as big as their market share might be in one category, they don't really actually own the whole market. There's a lot of us, including, again, most of The Verge, and I bet most of the people listening to this podcast right now, who want more from a gadget than just a sleek, mod-free Apple experience. I like to build things. And when it comes to gadgets, that's largely left me, building a lot of servers, gaming desktops, and keyboards. But as Chris noted, 3D printing has started to change things.

• 37:35Alex Cranz?

  There's more access to components now than ever before. You can build your own trackball or mouse now. And it sounds like you might even be able to build your own headphones, too. There are companies like Poopy out there building not the things themselves, but the communities that actually want to build them. I don't know if the Poopy subreddit is going to be quite as hopping as the Mechanical Keyboard subreddit in eight years, but I don't think this fandom is going to disappear. As 3D printing improves, as access to other materials improve, I think we're going to see more companies doing what Poopy is doing, but probably without the catchy name. If you have thoughts about this episode, I'm Alex H. Krantz on Twitter, or you can email us at [email protected]. We really do read all of them, and we really appreciate all of them. Our regular Vergecast show will be here on Friday.

• 38:19Alex Cranz?

  And then next Tuesday, I'll return for the final episode of this mini-series around creators. It's going to be all about the community modding game controllers to make them more accessible. So stay tuned, have fun. This episode of The Vergecast is produced by me, Alex Cranz, lead producer Liam James, and senior audio director Andrew Moreno.

• 38:42Speaker 06

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