- Ploopy turned the classic ThinkPad stylus into a stand-alone desktop controller
- Ploopy Bean uses magnetic sensing hardware that captures 20,000 samples per minute.
- 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 stylus has remained stubbornly obscure outside of 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 stylus — the same type famously associated with IBM and later Lenovo ThinkPad keyboards — inside a compact case, along with four programmable buttons.
This is how the pointing mechanism works
For anyone who spent years pushing the little red post to navigate spreadsheets or code, the design sparks instant recognition.
A stylus 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 under the tip.
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 allows up to eleven millimeters of movement in each axis, exceeding the typical range of portable implementations.
This extended travel distance is intended to reduce the finger fatigue sometimes reported by users who spend long hours with conventional styluses.
The four buttons around the stick use Omron D2LS-21 switches, and they come with standard left-click, right-click, middle-click, and click-to-drag or scroll assignments.
Because Bean runs on a Raspberry Pi RP2040 microcontroller with QMK open source firmware, these button functions are never locked in place.
Users can reconfigure each button through the VIA web application, a free browser-based tool that requires no coding knowledge.
Anyone inclined towards deeper modification can install fully custom firmware, and Ploopy publishes both hardware and software design files on GitHub.
This openness means that a broken component does not necessarily doom the device to obsolescence, as replacement parts can be manufactured with a 3D printer.
Availability and early demand
Early Access ordering for the Bean opened at $70 CAD, but the entire initial batch sold out almost immediately.
Anyone who missed the first wave will now have to contend with an 8-week delay under Tier A or a 20-week wait under Tier B.
The question that lingers over this device is whether a stand-alone stylus makes sense when placed next to a keyboard instead of 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 next to the keyboard might solve a different problem than the one that made the TrackPoint indispensable in the first place.
Via Liliputing
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