The Vergecast - 3D printing and trackballs: the future of gadgets?

Episode Date: May 10, 2022

In episode two of our Vergecast "creators series," Alex Cranz talks with the creators of Ploopy, the open source trackball that has a dedicated fanbase on Reddit. Alex also talks with Chris Person,��who recently wrote about Ploopy for The Verge, about how 3D printing and online communities are creating opportunities for gadget enthusiasts. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Support for the show comes from Retool. Too many companies run critical operations on duct taped spreadsheets, Slack workflows, and whatever else they could cobble together. Not because they want to, but because building internal tools means weeks of waiting on someone else's backlog. That's where Retool comes in. Build custom internal tools just by describing what you need. Prompts something like,

Build Me a Revenue Dashboard on our Salesforce data. And Retool actually builds it on your company's data, in your cloud with enterprise security built in. Go to retool.com slash Verchcast. We all need to retool how we build software. Hey, everybody, it's the United from the Vergecast. On Tuesdays this month, we're doing some extra episodes that are focused on creators, our favorite.

And in true Vergecast fashion, it's the nerdiest creators we can find. Last week, Alex Kranz talked to people building mechanical keyboards. Alex is here. What's up, Alex? Hey, what's up? What nerds did you find me for this week's episode? So this week, we're going to,

Full nerd. I mean, we've already been going full nerd, but we're going to be talking trackballs, which I think is like niche of niche. Like there are people who really care about gaming mice, but there are even fewer of us who care about trackballs. And I went and found some guys, and they created their own company to 3D print track balls. It's called Plupy. And they've got like a big, vibrant community on Reddit where people are like doing all these crazy mods and stuff. And we're going to talk to them about Plupy. Alex, why is it called Flupy? I'm not going to spoil it. You're going to have to listen. It's great. All right. Let's do it.

It. Take it away, Alex. You know how you maybe have a mouse or game controller and you absolutely love it? You adore the thing, but sometimes you look at it and you wonder, what if the mouse fit your hand better? Or the triggers on the back of the controller were longer. There's just a little tweak you want to make. With most gadgets that require some heavy-duty modding, some voiding of warranties, and a big hunt to find other people trying to do what you're trying to do. The idea behind Plupy, a company that makes 3D printed trackballs, is kind of

What if the community and the modding was built right in? I first heard about Plupy from a fellow trackball nerd, and I was immediately hooked on the concept. Most trackballs nowadays stick to a handful of tried and true designs and are made by companies like Logitech and Kinsington. There hasn't been a lot of innovation in the space. And it's felt for years, like all the experimentation with form and design stopped in 1997. But Plupy actively encourages people to come up with their own designs

and mods and weird ideas, and they all share them with each other on a pretty active subreddit. I'm going to talk to someone from that subreddit later, but first, I want to talk to brothers Colin and Phil Lamb. My name's Colin, and I'm on the call with Phil, my partner and my brother, and I'm one of the co-founders of Plupy Corporation. Hi, my name is Phil. I'm also one of the co-founders of Plupy.

And yes, they can explain why it's called that. So let's get right into our interview. So originally, my brother and I were just spitballing about what kinds of names. we wanted to have for the company. Before this, the companies that the two of us were running had very serious names and very ridiculous offerings. And we thought, you know, maybe like if we switch it up and we have a silly name, it'll help sharpen our focus and give us a little bit of direction. And it just so happened that we were kicking around a couple of names one day. And the name came up and we loved it so much that we decided to stick with it.

Is this the first trackball you guys had worked on together? Yeah. Phil was actually the one who came up with the idea originally. I think it's, like, we grew up in the 90s, right? And I accidentally walked into an office depot when I was like 14 or 15, and I came out of that store with one of these, with one of the originals, right? The Microsoft Trackball Explorer. And it turns out there's an entire community of people that just remember this thing very fondly.

Because honestly, it's a magical piece of equipment. I think when we were talking about something new to do, it was just the project that I had kicking around in my head. I was like, well, I had two of these. I broke both of them. Boy, I wish that I could just have another one. And I bet you there's lots of people out there that feel the same way. You are 100% right. I'm one of those people. I like, I had my track balls when like, I was really big into the Logitech thumbball. And when they started like reducing the number of trackballs they were making in the late 2000s, I like went out and bought a bunch and head, like, I got a stock up, which is like a very weird thing to do. And when my friend hit me up

and was like, hey, have you heard of Plupy? I was immediately like, oh my God, this is the best idea ever. Like, just lost my mind. I was like, you're going to write a story for us about this. Like, I have to know everything I can about Plupy. So it sounds like, was that initial Plupy kind of modeled after that, that Microsoft? I think the key idea was there are so many companies that are out there, they make something, especially if it's something that you use every day, like a keyboard or a mouse or set of headphones or something like that. And then for whatever reason, these companies stop supporting it. Maybe it's not profitable anymore. Maybe they can't get the parts anymore. But these are gadgets that people get really attached to and they get really used to them.

And then all of a sudden they're gone. They're not available anymore. And it really sucks when that happens. I think everybody has experienced something like that, something that they really enjoy and all of a sudden it's gone. And I think one of the key drivers behind what we were doing, with open sourcing everything was it doesn't matter if we stop making this thing. This thing is always going to be available. This thing is always going, it's always going to be possible to make this thing. And it's not going to be hugely expensive. It's not going to require $50,000 to make an injection mold or anything like that.

It's always going to be available. I think that was really the key driver behind why we were going with it in that direction to begin with. I think what's really also kind of cool about this is that you have a lot of different types there. Because trackballs were so unique for such a long period of. time, there were so many different form factors. And as things kind of like drilled down, suddenly we had like the Logitech thumbball in the Kensington giant ball. And that was kind of it. Yeah, it was funny. The core technology behind all of them is roughly the same. There's some differences in the sensors. Like QMK, huge thing in the keyboard space. It's not a thing in the mouse

space or the trackball space or anything like that. And like just a couple of developers from QMK reached out to us when they figured out what microcontroller we were using and what technology we were using. And that kind of helped make everything more modular, like moving from the classic, which is the original one that we released into the nano, which is only a ball. Like, there's no buttons on it at all. It's only a ball. Moving and porting everything over was really, really straightforward. So it's really easy to create a new form factors and new input types. people are really responding to the sort of philosophy behind the original product. And one of the things about running an open source company is that people are really, really eager to give you feedback.

And we're also very accessible on Reddit. And people are just not afraid to tell you what they think. And, you know, just for a while, what we were hearing was, this is great, but I wish it was this. And this is great, but I wish it was this. Every once in a while, enough people would kind of pile up kind of saying the same thing that we said, all right, well, let's see what happens when we, when we actually do it, right? And that's how we ended up with what we have today, because mostly just people were like, if we want that, we're like, all right, cool, we can make it. So for trackballs, it was this one thing you'd always loved. Was there ever the idea that you might

do something else besides trackballs with poopie? I think so, yeah. The idea was always to stick with open source. It was always going to be available. There was always going to be options for customization. There was always going to be a community aspect around it, especially, you know, trying to get other people involved, developing new features and just, just making it accessible. And one of the things that we're working on right now is the headphones projects. Yeah. And we've just explored like a couple of different ideas in the past.

Some not really so successful and some that are really capturing our attention right now. So we always knew we were going to go beyond trackballs. I guess we just didn't realize that we would spend because it's been over two years where we focused pretty much primarily on trackballs and input devices. I honestly find it fascinating because I think when keyboards really started to develop as this kind of open source. project that people were working on, that made sense to me because it's relatively, relatively, I'm not designing my own keyboard anytime soon. Simple. There's a PCB, there's, switches, it's all pretty standard. But with track balls, you have a lot of additional

complexities there. You have to track this ball. You've got these optical sensors. Like, that just seemed like a lot of extra work for you, Guy. The complexity is kind of a blessing and a curse, right, in the sense that it's actually one of the most complicated things about the design work is making everything fit together, right? As you say, a keyboard is a linear array of switches, and it's almost, I don't want to say it. I don't want to oversimplify it, but it's, you know, it's a box and you jam some switches inside. I can build a keyboard very easily. I have my plupy and have not yet built it. And, you know, designing a mouse, all the components are sort of meant to be used in a context where you have control over the mechanisms

down to the like kind of microphone level, right? People expect injection-wolded parts to be very accurate. And so in the context where we're building something that anybody can, you know, kind of spread out on their desk and put together and we can 3D print or they can 3D print for that because all of our designs are designed in such a way that you should be able to just kind of use a sort of a bog standard 3D printer to produce this stuff. There's the whole idea behind replicating it. Why would we make it special to our like super cool, amazing secret print farm? But that means that there's an extended design process to make sure that all these technologies that are normally designed for a sort of high precision environment fit into this more

kind of loose set of manufacturing technologies. I remember kind of early on in the design process, Phil would send me a bunch of stills because we have, we're not co-located, we're located different spaces, and he would send me a bunch of stills, and he would say, print these. This is the final version of the classic. It's definitely going to work. And before they would even come off the printbed, he would have new still files for me because the design process just required so much iteration to get everything precise and get everything right. So it's challenging. It's challenging work for sure just to make sure everything fits together. Yeah. Well, I know some people, a friend, we're talking to him for the podcast even, have done a lot of 3D printing with the really the small one that's just the

ball. But these other ones that have to need a little bit more precision, have you seen a lot of like iteration from plupy users, like making their own 3D designs for these things with four buttons on them and a scroll wheel? Not so much additional buttons, but the one that stands out to me is there was a designer working out of the UK, and he came up with a design that used all of our trackball designs used roller bearings. They kind of have some drawbacks. They're noisy. They can wiggle around. I think that they work great, especially with the balls that we ship, but this designer was not super, super happy with them. So he put in a new kind of bearing called a ball transfer unit, which has no theoretical resistance in any direction. They're supposed to roll forever, basically.

and he basically redid the design for the entire top shell right from the ground up, including these ball transfer units. And that's probably the biggest amount of rework that I've seen done on it. And it's really very different. Do you think you're going to see more of that, like more people kind of as Pupy grows in popularity, hopefully? I hope so. Yeah.

As well on the software side, the software side actually is where it really, really took off. Yeah. Because for a while there, we, were the only ones who were involved in writing firmware for it and making sure that it was accessible. And then as soon as the developers from Q&K got involved, it was, it was like watching a monster transformed to life because I don't think we were involved at all. Yeah. Apart from just chipping into the code every once in a while or doing, answering a few questions.

But that was really amazing to see just how the community took that forward. There's all sorts of weird stuff, right? There's, you can, you can scroll with the ball. And then there was a, somebody ported it to this. There's this thing on QMK called VIA, which allows you to remap buttons without having to reprogram the device. And so somebody went and did that. Now you can remap all the buttons on every plopie product. I guess the ones that have it because the nano doesn't have any buttons.

Yeah. There's a bunch of other. Oh, somebody did something to the scroll wheel where it made it more. They added detents to it. Yeah, because all our scroll wheels, they're smooth. And so this gives like the little notches. Yeah, exactly. That one involved the use of a paper clip, a very creative use of a paper clip.

I was extremely impressed. That was something. Yeah, the thing we were always hoping for was by making everything as accessible as we possibly could, then if anyone ever saw a need, they would fix it and they would open source it themselves. I saw someone who wanted to put in, normally the ball that we ship with is 1.75 inches for the classic. And they wanted to use a trackball explorer ball. I don't know why, but they wanted to use one. And it's 1.818 inches. And they redesigned the entire top just to accommodate that ball and open sourced it. And it's available. Like, you can print it right now if you want. So really amazing to see. That's very, very cool. We talked a little bit about the community. It sounds like plupy.

I'm never going to get stop, like, giggling when I say plupy. I'm so sorry. You know what? It fills my heart with joy every time someone laughs at the name. I love it. Where is your community? Is it primarily on Reddit? Is it on Discord?

It's primarily on Reddit. It's just been a place that's been really welcoming. Truth be told, there has been some feedback that has not been helpful. But it's balanced by the unbelievable. wealth of knowledge and experience that people bring. And it's definitely pushed everything for. We never would have gotten involved with QMK if we hadn't been on Reddit. And it's just been, it's been really incredible. Was Reddit and being there and developing that community always kind of part of the plan? I wouldn't say it was part of the plan. It kind of happened by accident.

I think Phil was working on the top for the classic. This was maybe two or three months after we decided to team up. And he just showed it to me. And I thought it looked amazing. And I said, you know what, I'm just going to post this picture on Reddit. I know that there's a trackball subreddit. I'm just going to post it there. Yeah. And there wasn't really any thought or plan behind it. And I did.

And people were really excited about it. And we just kept bringing more news and more developments to Reddit. And the more that it happened, the more excited people got. So, yeah, it just kind of happened organically. We do, like, we do new product design, essentially. I don't want to say on Reddit, more or less on Reddit. You know, and I think that's something we do that, not really anyone else. I don't see anyone else doing that.

I've got piles of half-finished designs just kind of sitting here, and we put them on Reddit, and as Colin said, we get a ton of feedback, and it's really helpful because people tell you what they want. And they tell you what they do not like. What's something that they truly do not like? So a lot of the feedback that we're getting more recently is on our headphones. So that's kind of what's top of mind. We frequently post a frequency response. It's as close as you can get to a digitization of how the headphones sound without actually putting them on your head, right? People are pretty picky about that one. They're like, I don't like, I don't like this part or this part seems not that good.

People have very strong feelings about frequency response curves. They do. But you know what? It's been helping us focus on the sorts of things to try and push ahead a little bit further. One of the things that sticks out to me from track balls is, so some of the things we make, we make a left-handed version. Yes. Not all of them, but some of them. And that vacuum, that kind of time before there were left-handed options, people hated that.

They hated that with a passion. Just the sort of like lack of left-handed option was just this thing that people really got stuck on. Do you guys think about these bigger companies and stuff that are still in the trackball space? Like, have you heard responses from them? Do you think about like how your products may like make them do things differently? Almost never. We're so small compared to the other. I mean, I think we ship in a year what Logitex ships every like 25 minutes or something like that.

I think it's less than that. It's like five minutes. Maybe five minutes. Yeah. Yeah. I would be very flattered if Kensington decided that they needed to alter their business strategy because of what we were doing. Somehow I don't think there are any executives losing sleep over there because of what we've done. I mean, I think it is interesting that for the most part, the trackball space hasn't had a lot of movement.

It hasn't had a lot of innovation. So, like, you guys are kind of pushing this space forward in that respect and that you're saying, hey, there's still an audience. here. There's still people who care about this and make it cooler, make new things. Yeah, I think, especially with the way that we've positioned everything, you know, trying to make it open source and using licenses that are really friendly for open source, it'd be really awkward, I think, for a more traditional company to come in and... Just start printing your designs. Yeah, especially with the way that they're designed and everything. They're not at all designed

for traditional manufacturing. Yeah. If a larger company were to come in and start doing... similar things. I think that it would only be beneficial for people who are using trackballs. It would mean that there'd be more offerings on the table. And like you said, you know, there's, there hasn't been much innovation going on in the last little while. So maybe there's still room for, for new developments to be made. Yeah. No, it was just, it was nice to see like, oh, somebody's actually willing to, like, think about this and think about how maybe the way we interact with our computers

could be different. Yeah. I think kind of the real leap towards something really new. It was Phil, who originally was he pitched me the idea for the nano and he said, we have to do this. There's just no alternative. We have to do it. I'll be perfectly honest. I didn't understand how it could possibly be beneficial because it has no buttons, right? It's just a ball. It's only a ball. And by far it's our most popular kit. They're flying off the shelves. But that's a fantastic example of kind of being on Reddit and seeing the community develop because I don't want to say that you could just kind of look at a post history in a subreddit and just kind of come away with the conclusion that this was a good idea because I don't think either of us had that feeling. It was more

of an experiment. But it's very much like we're close to the people who love our products. And sometimes we can kind of get a sense for what they need before they need it. And I don't want to go full Steve jobs on this and be like, retail users what they like. But there's very much like there's a lot of value in being deeply connected to the people who love your products. And we're really fortunate to have that. I think McCallin and feel really impressed on me more than anything else is that the community is driving the company as much as them. After the break, I'm going to talk with Chris Person, a very active member of that community who has made a trackball based around a pool cue ball and is currently trying to make a trackball with a steel ball bearing instead of a more traditional plastic ball. He's also the guy who introduced me to Pluppy to begin with. So stay tuned. Support for this show comes from Shopify. Starting something new isn't just hard. It can be really scary to. So much work goes into this thing that you're not entirely sure will even work.

But here's a better thought. What if it did all work? What if your instincts were actually right all along? Shopify wants to help you get there. They're the commerce platform behind millions of businesses worldwide and nearly 10% of all e-commerce in the U.S. From established brands like Allbirds and Hines to companies just getting started. Their design tools make it simple to create the exact online presence you're envisioning. with hundreds of ready-to-use templates available.

And with built-in marketing tools, you can launch full email and social campaigns in just a few clicks. So you can connect with customers wherever they are. It's time to turn those what-ifs into with Shopify today. You can sign up for your $1 per month trial today at Shopify.com slash vergecast. You can go to shopify.com slash vergecast. That's Shopify.com slash vergecast. Hey, we're back.

I think I mentioned this before on The Verge cast, but the reason I went and bought a Plupy is because my friend Chris Person slid into my Twitter DMs to talk about his own build. Naturally, I had to beg him to write about PluP for the Verge, and he did. And when he isn't in my DMs, Chris runs the YouTube channel, Highlight Reels,

which finds and highlights the weirdest clips from video games. This is Highlight Reel from May 5th, 2020, and we're here to show you some of the best recent clips from around the gaming world. He felt like the right person to talk to because Chris is super active in the plupy community. He understands the appeal,

but he's also just been out there building these things, and he's collaborating with other community members, and he's 3D printing a whole lot of plastic. Let's talk to Chris. I was kind of excited to talk to you about this, because the first time I heard about plupy and about building your own trackball was you descending into my DMs on Twitter

and being like, hey, Kranz, look at this cool thing I found. Look what I'm doing right now. Like, do you remember just like assaulting my DMs with it? Okay, you're like one of four people I do that too. Not to make you feel less special, but like there's some, but no, no, I do remember doing that. I think I thought it was funny at first because it was like called plupy. And it's like, hey, check it out, plupy.

I'm not a trackball person initially. Like I'm not one of those people who's just like really deep into using it as my primary interface. But it's fascinating because like in the 90s it like kind of was pretty prevalent in a way that it simply isn't. now. Yeah. You know what I mean? Like you could see trackballs like there were normal people with trackballs. It wasn't just this thing that like weirdos had all the time. And now it's absolutely the weirdos. Like I say this is a trackball weirdo. Like I have suffered for years because I love trackballs and I'm one of the few people I know that loves them and I will defend them to the death. And you popped into my DMs and was like, hey, look at this cool trackball. And I was like, oh no, I have a

problem. Well, that's the thing is like to give a little background on what Plupy's deal is, I think You need a little bit of context on keyboards, not too much. Yeah. But like the deal on like keyboard stuff recently is that like, you know, okay, yeah, people love mechanical keyboards. They love clicky things. They love silent ones. You yada, yada, yada.

But like when you get down to it, what really became the thing was that you could do open source firmware. So you could just remap your keys. You can do macros. You can do layers, which is really, really interesting. And you just need less keys to do the same thing. Right. And with less movement.

And so as time has gone on, the additional. adaptability of not just one firmware like QMK, which is the kind of the standard, but like other ones like ZMK, but like various ones to like, you know, get it to work in Bluetooth and stuff like that. All these open source things that make it so you can do all this stuff without installing a bunch of dumb crap on your computer and so that it can work on the processor and like not have to be tethered to a specific device. Right. And so taking that philosophy and then like going into the like pointing space and being like,

Okay, but what if you did that for a pointing device? Plupy makes like a mouse. They make a thumb ball. They make all these different things. And what got me into the idea that I could just make this, first was like my friend being like, oh, people make modifications to their plupy. That was the first thing. Yeah.

Oh, yeah. He's like, I got a three-you printer. We can just print this. And you can add what's called a BT or ball transfer unit. That's like the little balls that support the big track ball and roll across each other. It's a silly name for something. that's basically like a cylinder with a bunch of ball bearings in it holding up one ball bearing making it so it can rotate really smoothly and then you can put the track ball you have on them so somebody

made a mod for that and I was like oh that's pretty cool my friend 3D printed that out to me we were getting really into it you know oh you know you can strip out the lube and put new lubrication in you know all this sort of stuff customize the crap out of it yeah yeah so basically it's like I got this this little track ball they make one called the nano yeah which is the smallest one And that was the thing that I think was like, okay, goddamn, I got to get this. Because it is like $40 Canadian, 45, so it's really cheap for what you're getting, you know. And then it fits right in the middle of, I'm one of these people with like a split keyboard. So it makes it so that I have this like little tiny pointing device for doing little tiny things,

making sort of I have to reach over to my mouse every time. And then from there, I got that really liked it, got way more use out of it, did the modification. And while I was still doing the modification stuff, found out about this guy named J Fedor. he did this thing where he created his own platform, his own like PCB for something similar, and then just prototyped a bunch of them. And at this point, I had already gotten into the fact that you can just go to JCLPCB and like all PCB and these like PCBing manufacturers. And just order a PCB.

And just order stuff that like people put on GitHub. Like do you have to solder it yourself when you get it or do you just like it comes to soldered? What you can do is you can upload like the bill of materials and then. then what's called a component placement file, a component placement list, rather, and they'll just like do it for you. It's going to cost you more money. I think I could have like five of them for 30 bucks and then gave them to a bunch of people.

I screwed up, though, because I didn't recognize, because I missed a couple of parts and it added a whole extra journey to it. But yeah, no, it's actually pretty easy. As long as you have the files, as long as you kind of know what you're doing, to just get a circuit board printed out, as long as it's open source, as long as they have the parts, you're fine. Yeah, I don't even know how to like start. because I'm still, I haven't really soldered.

Poopie is going to be my first big project. I got very excited when you sent all of this to me because, well, you don't like trackballs until this moment. I've always loved them. I was very upset when everybody, for a long time, kind of Logitech and other trackball makers, Kinsington, kind of shied away from the space. And everything they were doing was either really focused on graphic artists and these big professionals and not to people who were just like using it to play video games and fart

around on the internet. And they all moved away from that. And I was like, oh, no, what am I going to, like, there was one manufacturer. It was just Logitech making a thumb trackball. And I was like, what am I going to do with my life? I went and bought like four of them so I wouldn't have to worry about them. And now like we're starting to see trackballs become a thing again. And poopies, maybe not at the forefront of it because it's, it's, you know, this big open source project. But it's really like providing these cool opportunities and these cool just like designs that I wouldn't even think of. Like that's what I went and spent so much money on poopie just because I was like,

oh, I've never even thought of using this design. I wonder what this is like and it's cheap. There's other projects like this that had done it before. Like there's one called the oddball that's a 3D printed integrated. The trackball. Yeah, yeah. It's a trackball inside a keyboard. It's a split keyboard.

If you look up the oddball keyboard, the person like printed it out, sanded it, crylocks did, primer, all that stuff like that. And then they printed out their own PCB that's just using like, I think, five volt logic or something like that. And it's pretty straightforward. It works within integrated MCU and stuff like that. But the thing is like, it's a combination of two things. One, it's the idea that technology isn't fun. You know what I mean? Like there's a lot of joy that has been taking it out of using the computer. Being on the computer sucks a lot of the time. And so what can I do to make this mine? What can I do to really interact with it in a way that hasn't been since like Radio Shack days?

Yeah. To demystify the process between what's between me and the computer, even more. But also a realization that stuff is really cheap on Alley Express. Like, if I wanted to, you know, you could disassemble your mouse, desolder the mouse clicks, and then put new better microswitches in there. You know what I mean? And that's not a difficult thing. I was talking with somebody on a Discord server I'm on who made a board called the Chunky, which uses two Cirque track pads, which are the track pads that the steam controller uses.

And it's like, okay, yeah, now you can use like dual touch pads on this and like weird rotary encoders. It's just in like the ways in which you can just get granular with like, you know, exactly how you want to use this. And you know, it's you're still just talking in the computer, but it's also that and like the fact that I never want to install Razor Synapse ever again if I can avoid it. Yeah, I think that's like a really interesting part of this because I got a Macs studio. Listeners will know this. We've talked about it a bunch. But I got this Max Studio. I love it. It restarts itself every day for some unknown reason that I'm hoping will sort itself out.

And every single time the Logitech software pops up because that's a trackball I use. And it's like, hey, do you want to go change some preferences in Logitech? And I'm like, no, if I didn't do it the last 12 times it's restarted this week, why would I do it today? And Logitech Razor, they're all like trying to get in front of your eyeballs all the time. So I guess they think, well, let's put really obnoxious software on people's computers. And these keyboard makers and trackball makers are saying, wait, actually, that's bad. Let's stop that. Just use the device.

I think the first one of them that figures out that there's a market for that, if any of them do. Yeah. Would be smart. Yes. But I don't necessarily know if they are. It's not within their interest to do that. And it's a really minor community of people who would be like, I really want to edit the text file on this firmware to like be able to like change the acceleration curve on how this,

or give it an acceleration curve. You know, that's a very minor group of people. Well, you say it's minor, but you've talked. a lot about these Discord groups and these Reddit groups where there's a lot of people doing this and really interested in it. You know, the mechanical keyboard Reddit started when I joined it in like 2012, 2013 or something. It was a few thousand people and now it's over a million. And I think we all kind of underestimate that market and that interest because there's just not a lot of easily accessible products that feed that. But I do want to kind of poke at you

and Discord and Reddit. You and I are both on those boards. I am absolutely a lurker. You're much more active in it. How much of Reddit fuels this kind of hobby for you? It's a little bit of that and a little bit of like asking around on Discord. I think the Discord element is a little because like I'm in a bunch of them and I'm, I think I got everyone in this one Discord. I'm in the Absalom Erogogen one. Uh-huh. Eroggen's a project that makes it so it's easier to quickly prototype keyboard by storing it all as W-Y-A-M-L code. Okay. So it makes it easy to be like, oh, I want to move that column down and then it just generates the PCB. That's dope.

By changing a few easy-to-read parameters that anybody can do. I just kept talking about trackballs and now, like, a lot of them are more trackball people. But one of them is definitely already had like five plupies. Just the two of you and like your own little smaller Discord. It's a small place. You know what I mean? It's actually pretty small. I think a lot of, there's a lot of lurkers.

Yeah. But the people that post, it's not that many people. After I posted the article, like three different people DM me and they're like, okay, can you please like do you have any of those do any of those PCBs can you send them to me is it okay if I get you know and I was just like man you just do it yourself and I know one thing I will say is also like recently raspberry pie put out the the Pico and the RP 2040 which is a microprocessor very very powerful and very cheap importantly yeah and the keyboard community is like still trying to wrap their head around it but you're literally seeing like people who do this in their spare time like on these

discords like talking about hey if anyone does anyone want to mess around with this and then asking problems. Like there was a big long conversation today in one of the one of the discords I was in about like Kale's pseudomonopoly over low profile switches and how like well maybe what about Gatoron, you know, and stuff like that. And so people are always like tinkering around and you actually see it pretty iteratively. You see it a little more like the results on Reddit, but in the comments and then in Discord you actually see the process a little bit more. And I think it's really interesting because it's like, yeah, I feel like you just join one of these. You know, it's really interesting because if other times we think about social media and we think primarily like YouTube or

Twitter or even Twitch as these places that are developing fandoms, developing these communities. And we don't think as much about Reddit, except for when we're talking about like the Donald, you know, sub. But Discord too, it sounds like, is really becoming this place where people are gathering and talking about these things and communing in a way that we haven't like seen in a while. Is that right? Telegram too. Telegram, yeah. Because a lot of those guys are.

Russian or Eastern European and they're just like love talking about that stuff on there. You know what I mean? I'm not a telegram person nor do I intend to be. But yeah. And you found ploopy through Discord, through a friend on Discord or no. I found ploupy through looking up trackballs, I think, on Reddit. And then like I ended up talking to people on discords and stuff like that. And the J-Feder stuff was like one of my friends who helped me 3D print out the thing. And that's the other thing is that 3D printing got way easier. I used to look at 3D printing as this thing that like, because I, because not only did I do the plupy, I did this other second trackball using the Jaffodor ones to two button one. It has a full like, I got a black cue ball. Yeah. Like an Amaranth one. It's enormous. It's enormous. It's a really

big trackball. I usually don't use it that much because it's like it's too big and because I haven't found a way to do a B2 mod on it. But, you know, 3D painting not only got cheaper, you can now just like do it online. Like the other day, somebody uploaded a bunch of like weird sculpted key caps. Yeah. that they printed out in resin, so they look like teeth. And then they're like, oh, yeah, I just got a printing service to print it for me. And I'm like, all right, I'm going to get that printed out in nylon. So I'm getting these key caps that are meant for low profile keyboards printed out in like, I think it's, what is it, like, N11, P11. I forget what it's called.

But it's this like scratchy, weird, sandpapery nylon that's a process called MGF printing. And you can just get this stuff sent to you. Like, you don't need to like buy a Prusa or like one of these 3D printer. you either have to have a friend who has it or you don't mind like going online to like a service that'll do it or cut acrylic for you. Well, I'm kind of curious about that because my assumption with 3D printing a lot of times was there was a certain amount of talent and experience to getting it to go right, right? Like you have to print it just so and then you have to like make sure you remove it so it doesn't break. Do you find yourself having to go and reprint things that you do through a service? In this case, this is the first time I've used Craft Cloud, I think is the name of it.

I think all three P's the company that owns them. And they're like a front end for like several printing services. So it's like a comparison shopper. In the case of the ones that I had, a friend of mine who printed it out and knew what a good print looks like, did it. So there was that element of it. But in this case, you could just shop around for like, you know, SLA resin printing or whatever, stuff like that. I was pricing out how much it would cost to print something out in titanium, not as much you would think. I think a space bar is like 130 bucks. But yeah, I don't know. I guess the point is

what was NEAF because of the access to the tools is increasingly less so. And I think that the saturation for things like 3D printing and the saturation for things like laser cutters, those things are getting such that like it's really, really easy to do. And like other people have already done a lot of the work. And that's something I'd like to stress. Like I'm working on a board right now, but like all this stuff is stuff that other people made. Yeah. And that I was just like, oh, I could just get that printed out. What if I did that, but I did it in a different color?

And that's the thing is people are just like, they don't want money. I mean, sometimes they want money for it and obviously pay them if they, you know, but if it's open source and they'll like go to town, they're pretty nice about it because this is just their hobby. Yeah. Oh, like the poopie guys, they just printed out like in their home or whatever and send it to you. I ordered it and like said these are the colors I want.

And one day I just got it all in like just a regular zip. lock bag, nothing fancy, like in a box, wrapped in some, like, Canadian newspaper. And it was great. And I was just like, oh, this is just like some person who really just like digs trackballs like I do. And that's a nice feeling. But that's the thing. You actually see the people who run these shops that you like know. Yeah. Like in Discord. You're like, oh, that's the guy who writes, who runs the MK Ultra. It's the name of the low profile keyboard store.

I mean, that's the way I felt when I saw you drop your trackball in the trackball subred it. I was like, oh, hey, I know that guy. It's nice. It's a nice feeling. It's a series of, hey, I know that guys. And like, and, and they're really nice. And like, you know, just don't be a dick. It's pretty straightforward. A motto we should always all live by. Well, thank you, Chris, for chatting with us about plupy and about trackballs and 3D printing and subredits and Discord. I mean, we just covered everything today. So that was really awesome. It was nice. Thank you. It was nice talking to you. I want to thank Phil and Colin and Chris again for talking to be on the show. And I want to

Thank you for listening. I think a lot of the time here at The Verge, and just in the gadget community in general, we get hung up on what big companies like Apple or Logitech, I mean, heck, even Kensington, are doing. These are the companies building the devices we interact with daily. But as big as their market share might be in one category, they don't really actually own the whole market. There's a lot of us, including, again, most of the Verge, and I bet most of the people listening to this podcast right now, who want more from a gadget than just a sleek, mod-free Apple experience. I like to build things, and when it comes to gadgets, that's largely left me building a lot of servers, gaming desktops, and keyboards.

But as Chris noted, 3D printing has started to change things. There's more access to components now than ever before. You can build your own trackball or mouse now. And it sounds like you might even be able to build your own headphones, too. There are companies like Plupy out there building not the things themselves, but the communities that actually want to build them. I don't know if the Plupy Subbreddit is going to be quite as hopping as the mechanical keyboard subreddit in eight years, but I don't think this fandom is going to disappear. As 3D printing improves, as access to other materials improve,

I think we're going to see more companies doing what Plupy is doing. They're probably without the catchy name. If you have thoughts about this episode, I'm Alex H. Cranz on Twitter, or you can email us at Vergecast at theverge.com. We really do read all of them, and we really appreciate all of them. Our regular Vergecast show will be here on Friday, and then next Tuesday I'll return for the final episode of this miniseries around Creator. It's going to be all about the community modding game controllers to make them more accessible.

So stay tuned, have fun. This episode of The Vergecast is produced by me, Alex Cranes, lead producer Liam James, and senior audio director Andrew Marino.