Ploopy and the promise of an open-source trackball

The worst thing about my beloved Logitech trackball is the software. Every time my computer restarts the annoying Logitech software pops up and asks me to fiddle with my system preferences. I never do. My trackball works exactly as I need it to, and the software seems to do nothing but vex me.

A small company called Ploopy, started by brothers Colin and Phil Lam, has created a trackball — also called Ploopy — that has no annoying software. Instead it relies on QMK, open-source firmware originally created for keyboards that stores all the crucial settings on the hardware instead of the computer.

That wasn’t the reason I purchased a Ploopy. It was all the other elements of the open-source trackball that appealed to me: Ploopy’s...

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