Ploopy Gets Touchy with Its Latest Open-Hardware Pointing Device: The 3D-Printable Ploopy Trackpad

3D-printable open-hardware computer peripherals specialist Ploopy has released a new design, this time aiming for something with no moving parts at all: the Ploopy Trackpad.

"The Ploopy Trackpad is finally here! It's completely 3D-printed, and it runs QMK," Ploopy's Colin Lam, who founded the company with brother Phil, says of the new peripheral. "It's powered with a [Raspberry Pi] Pico, and uses the Microchip ATMXT1066TD (a very, very high-end chip) to do all of the tracking. It's also got a great, low-friction, high-durability finish on the tracking surface that's great for all-day usage."

Following the company's earlier trackball and mouse designs, the Ploopy Trackpad is a USB-connected trackpad with a 156×99mm (around 6.1×3.9") tracking area. Under the lid is a Raspberry Pi RP2040 microcontroller, with two Arm Cortex-M0+ cores running at 125MHz, connected to a Microchip ATMXT1066TD touchscreen controller — though, rather than a screen, here it's tracking up to 16 simultaneous touch points on the trackpad's upper surface at a 125Hz polling rate.

The company claims that the firmware, based on the QMK project, offers smooth scrolling, out-of-the-box multitouch and gesture control under both Linux and Microsoft Windows, and palm rejection. "Modification of the firmware is easy," Ploopy claims, "and the [QMK] developer community is huge."

Like all Ploopy devices, including the company's Raspberry Pi RP2040-powered headphones, the Ploopy Trackpad is a commercial product you can buy as a kit or a ready-to-use gadget. Like all Ploopy devices, though, it's also open source: you can download everything you need to make your own, including 3D print files — and Ploopy itself is building on an existing open source effort, having used George Norton's earlier Peacock trackpad project as a starting point.

More information is available on the Ploopy Trackpad product page, while the company's store offers a do-it-yourself kit at CA$99.99 (around $72) or a fully-assembled unit for CA$129.99 (around $94). The more adventurous can find the required PCB design files and 3D print files on GitHub under the Strongly Reciprocal version of the CERN Open Hardware License Version 2.