Ploopy Gets in a Spin with the Knob, a Highly-Sensitive 3D-Printable Peripheral for Your PC
High-precision scrolling, media control, and more can be yours for under $40 — or print your own, if you'd prefer.
Open-hardware peripheral specialist Ploopy has announced its latest design, and this time it's getting in a twist: meet the Ploopy Knob.
"The Ploopy Knob is a stand-alone dial that runs QMK and can be programmed to do anything you want," the company promises of its flat black puck peripheral. "With a smooth feel and great finish, it’s a Knob you'll want to touch all day long. The Knob features high-resolution scrolling, right out of the box. You’ll get smooth, pixel-by-pixel scrolling for a buttery-smooth scrolling experience."
The Knob is a 3D-printed rotary input device, powered by Raspberry Pi's first-generation RP2040 microcontroller pre-loaded with the open source QMK firmware. An ams OSRAM AS5600 position sensor, run at a 1kHz-plus polling rate and a 12-bit resolution, tracks the rotation of the Knob's upper surface — and, using the stock firmware, turns that into a high-resolution scrolling action on Windows and Linux or a standard-resolution scrolling action on macOS.
That's not all the Knob can do, though. The firmware can be reconfigured to act as a volume control, for jog-dial-style media playback control, zoom in an image editor, and more. The Knob can also be customized for look and feel: as with all Ploopy designs, it's 3D-printed and open source with STEP files and PCB design files freely published.
This is far from Ploopy's first peripheral: the company launched its open source trackball six years ago, followed by a mouse, headphones, and most recently a laptop-style trackpad device — and has even released designs it originally made for internal use, including a surface-mount device (SMD) feeder for the pick-and-place machines used in the manufacturing of its products.
The Ploopy Knob is up for pre-order on the official product page at CA$49.99 (around $37); those wanting a do-it-yourself version can find the design files and firmware source code on GitHub under the strongly reciprocal version of the CERN Open Hardware License Version 2 and the GNU General Public License 3 respectively.