This strange, standalone ThinkPad nub device sold out instantly despite confusing almost everyone outside the pointing stick cult | Daily Reports Online
- Ploopy transformed the classic ThinkPad pointing stick into a standalone desktop controller
- Ploopy Bean uses magnetic sensing hardware, capturing 20,000 samples per second
- Open-source firmware allows complete customization of every button and function
The computer mouse has splintered into countless variations over the decades, yet the pressure-sensitive pointing stick has remained stubbornly obscure outside a devoted circle of users.
Canadian company Ploopy has now introduced a standalone device built entirely around this fingertip-controlled nub.
The Ploopy Bean houses a red pointing stick — the same type famously associated with IBM and later Lenovo ThinkPad keyboards — inside a compact chassis alongside four programmable buttons.
How the Pointing Mechanism Works
For anyone who spent years nudging that small red post to navigate spreadsheets or code, the design triggers instant recognition.
A pointing stick relies on pressure rather than travel, translating tiny fingertip nudges into cursor movement across a screen – and the Bean takes this principle and upgrades the sensing hardware beneath the nub.
Ploopy fitted a Texas Instruments TMAG5273 high-precision magnetic sensor that captures 20,000 samples per second and can detect displacement as fine as three microns.
The stick itself permits movement up to eleven millimeters in each axis, which exceeds the range typical of laptop implementations.
This extended travel distance aims to reduce the finger fatigue sometimes reported by users who spend long hours with conventional pointing sticks.
The four buttons around the stick use Omron D2LS-21 switches, and they ship with default assignments for left click, right click, middle click, and click-to-drag or scroll.
Because the Bean runs on a Raspberry Pi RP2040 microcontroller with QMK open-source firmware, those button functions are never locked in place.
Users can reconfigure every button through the VIA web application, a free browser-based tool that requires no coding knowledge.
Anyone inclined toward deeper modification can install entirely custom firmware, and Ploopy publishes both hardware and software design files on GitHub.
That openness means a broken component does not necessarily doom the device to obsolescence, since replacement parts can be fabricated with a 3D printer.
Availability and Early Demand
Early Access ordering for the Bean opened at a price of $70 CAD, but the entire initial batch sold out almost instantly.
Anyone who missed that first wave must now contend with an 8-week delay under Tier A or a 20 -week wait under Tier B.
The question lingering over this device is whether a standalone pointing stick makes sense when placed to the side of a keyboard rather than embedded within it.
Pointing sticks gained their original following precisely because they eliminated the need to move hands away from the home row
A separate box sitting beside the keyboard may solve a different problem than the one that made the TrackPoint indispensable in the first place.
Via Liliputing
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