Today, we’re releasing a brand new, open-source mouse design: the Bean, which is a pointing stick mouse (also called a nub mouse).
Nub mice are commonly found in laptops in the center of the keyboard. The Bean takes that concept and pushes it farther than anybody’s ever pushed it.
And kits are available for preorder from the Ploopy webstore for just $69CAD!
The heart of the Bean is the Texas Instruments TMAG5273, a high-precision magnet sensor. It samples 20,000 times per second and has 12-bit digital sensor resolution. It’s capable of detecting changes in movement as small as 3 microns, or a ten-thousandth of an inch.
It also has a much bigger movement area than a typical nub mouse; it can move a total of 11mm in each axis. That means that it won’t fatigue your finger the way a typical nub mouse would.
The silicone red nub was specifically chosen for its non-abrasive properties, but still sticks well. That means there’s enough friction to make sure that fine finger movements translate to accurate cursor movement, but don’t abrade your skin.
The Bean has built-in high-resolution scrolling. One button press is all it takes to convert the Bean into an accurate pixel-by-pixel scroller.
Lastly, the Bean has four buttons with Omron D2LS-21 switches, for crisp and snappy button presses.
The Bean’s default keymap is shown above. Four buttons isn’t a ton, but we fit six buttons worth of functionality into that package using QMK’s tap-combo features.
Even more outlandish layouts are possible, and easy to program onto your Bean using VIA, a free-to-use open-source webapp.
As with all of our other kits, the Bean is 3D-printed and fully open-source.
Mechanical files, electrical files, and firmware have all been released, along with documentation on how to make and modify your own. It’s all on Github!
We hope that the Bean will be as interesting for you to use as it was for us to make. We’re eternally grateful for this community’s support of our work, and we’re looking forward to seeing your Bean setups!
Stay in touch with us!
