The other day, I received my Ploopy Adept in the mail, after having waited since mid-December when I placed my preorder. I have been a trackball user for a few years now, mainly having used the Elecom HUGE and the Kensington Orbit Fusion. The Kensington was awesome, but the angle was a bit too steep for my wrists. The Elecom has been my favorite by far, but the stock bearings caused me a lot of grief with the insane amount of stiction. I eventually switched the bearings to chrome plated steel ball bearings and those worked wonderfully. However, with how much I use the trackball, about every 6-8 months I had to swap the bearings. No fun.

Enter: the Ploopy devices.

I’ve eyeballed these trackballs for a couple years now, but was never ready to settle on one. Plus, I wanted something with a couple more buttons. The ploopy had all I wanted:

  1. A good price

  2. some extra buttons (6)

  3. I wanted to try out a blade-style trackball

Now below are some of my initial thoughts on this trackball, after having used it only a couple days so far. I will have something more in-depth later

What’s Nice

I ordered mine in black and with a red ball. Looks great. I like bright colors, but I am also easily distracted and liked the more utilitarian look of just black and red. However, I think it is really cool that they have so many different color options.

Ploopy Adept

Stiction?

None to speak of. The ball glides so well. I’ve never had a trackball that felt so good in terms of ball movement. It is taking some getting used to honestly. The roller bearings feel great too. They are here to stay.

Button Quality

The 6 buttons on this trackball feel great. Nice and clicky, not mushy, not hard to press down either. They feel durable, and like they will last.

Ergonomics

This is subjective and I think depends on who you are. I like this shape and design. It does feel nice. The buttons above the ball are a little hard to reach, but no surprise there with the ball pretty well in the way.

The Chassis

I was expecting the chassis to feel like it was 3D printed, but it is actually nice and smooth. And it has some of the lines from the printing so it has some character to it, so I can have my cake and eat it too.

What’s Not Nice

So far, can’t say much negative about it. They suggest that you use Via to customize the buttons and such for this trackball. I was shocked that making changes were instant. The downside though is I don’t see any option to adjust my DPI, and I would have preferred the drag scroll (nice feature by the way) to be an on button press, not holding down the button.

The default layout doesn’t feel all that good either, I arranged the default keys around and that was good to my taste. Again, subjective.

Modifying This on Linux

This is where it was a bit odd. I couldn’t find any information on how to modify this mouse’s layout except on Reddit I think. To use Via, I needed to use a chromium browser, but by default on Linux you have to find the device from the command line and chmod a+rw that device. I had to find which device it was using in chromium’s log. In my case, it was /dev/hidraw6. After adjusting permissions, I could use Via. Then afterwards I reset it back to 0600. I think that some newer Linux users who are using this mouse won’t like having to enter a console and chmod the device after finding it to modify the layout.

What I Want

I’m not very creative with fancy custom layouts, but what I would like to be able to do easily is

  • Adjust the DPI - it’s too fast for my taste out of the box

  • have drag scroll be toggle feature, not hold

  • allow different functionality if I am holding or pressing a button

For the last point, I could see myself saying "on click for the bottom right button, enable drag scroll. On hold, enter layer 2". Or even vise-versa. I am pretty sure that is something that can be done in QMK…​my Ergodox EZ does that sort of stuff anyway, which is also a QMK board. So perhaps those features are there. However, I recall seeing I will have to disassemble my Adept if I want to make these changes.

Conclusion

Overall, I give this trackball a 9/10 on initial use and a couple days in. I really love how this mouse feels. The more I get used to it, the better it is. And lastly, maybe some of my nitpicks are easily addressable, or maybe not. I’m really not sure. But I am hoping that my couple requests are possible. If not, I think I will just get used to these things and still be a happy user. Thank you for the great device!

#100DaysToOffload #Post4