Welcome back, and remember to Join the Discord! Svalboard’s first post-alpha version, Lightly, has shipped units to more than a dozen countries, most US states, most Canadian provinces, and a downright surprising number of Austrians. My grandmother’s native Saskatchewan is also surprisingly overrepresented, including her birthplace, Moose Jaw (!) and the beloved-of-railroad-games mining town of Regina.
As I’ve spoken about before, the catalyst for the transition out of Alpha was the solidification of a flexible pointing system that could fully replace a mouse in most use cases.
Today, having launched both the original trackpoint-based Lightly AND the recent commercial launch of the trackball option, which also works in dual ball and trackpoint + ball configurations, I want to recap the state of pointing on Svalboard.
In this post I’ll highlight some current prototyping explorations, and in the second post I’ll talk about a new input modality coming soon — touch!
Trackpoint: Still awesome
Trackpoint is an ideal pointing system for general computing for people with RSI — it requires very little movement, and with a tall nub can also require very low forces. Previously I’ve written about the artificial constraint of the laptop screen on nub height, and how taller nubs allow more leverage and an almost impossibly low effort pointing experience.
It’s not as precise or fast as a mouse — it will never be. But it works in any orientation and only a centimeter away from the normal home positions of your index or middle finger on the Svalboard key clusters.
For a mobile rig, it’s still my go-to.
Trackball: The devotees are real
I’ve gotten a lot of nudging from the Svalboard Discord community to implement a trackball. Trackball enthusiasts are incredibly dedicated, and I’m committed to being open to being wrong about what I like.
I decided it was worth the effort to try it out, and I’ve been pleasantly surprised — I know that thumb trackballs are murderous to my hands, but I hadn’t used a finger trackball before. With early self-print kit builder and Discord user OrdovicianOperand leading the way with his own crazy build, I eventually put together a production-friendly first version with a 34mm ball.
The response has been impressive — about half of new orders include a trackball, and many still include a trackpoint for the other hand. I’ve even shipped one dual-ball rig.
I’ve learned a ton about where to source very very smooth round things of various sizes, and I’m currently using a 40mm SANWA ball on a custom-designed static-bearing mount with the sensor pitched up at the seemingly bonkers angle of 65 degrees, and loving it.
The parametric CAD model of the Svalboard trackball module is totally open — feel free to copy and modify it for any purpose. I hadn’t seen very many well-parameterized approaches to this problem, so I figured it was a good public contribution.
Turns out, just like with the trackpoint, when you break free of the constraints of typical consumer electronics form factors, you can find gold!
It’s hard to fit a trackball inside of anything, let alone a keyboard like this — height and horizontal extent both make it hard to get the whole thing compact enough to really fit together without any interferences.
Because Svalboard lets the hands rest in their natural pose and has so much room to work with south of the key clusters, the ball fits perfectly inside your curved fingers once you build a spare enough holder that avoids bumping into the clusters and your fingers themselves.
In this posture the natural point of contact and axis of roll rotation is much farther forward than a typical desktop trackball.
Instead of treating the ball as a separate input device you move your whole hand to, you can simply curl your fingers a bit or flatten your knuckles down to hit the ball with your phalanges, coming right back to the keys just a centimeter away.
The users who’ve got the 34mm versions now are really liking them — and I’m starting to consider converting to trackball for a lot of my own use — trackball is definitely more precise than trackpoint, with the tradeoff of requiring a lot more movement and not being as usable in odd orientations with high tenting angles. I still reach for the mouse most of the time when it’s time to CAD, but I can feel that impulse waning. Neat, huh?
My latest experiments have been pushing the limits of the current device architecture to see how far down the ball can be nestled in the case — this lets the fingers reach with less movement, and helps the bearings fit more easily and out of the way of the fingers and other mechanisms. It also has the benefit of making it easier to retain the ball at odd angles — though it will probably always be necessary to do a custom ball mount for 90 degree tenting.
Thanks for following along! Next time, we’ll talk about pointing solution #3, which is near and dear to my cold, hard, consumer electronics heart — touchpads.
Reminder:
Svalboard is a completely independent product development enterprise with no investors — 100% bootstrapped innovation and honest product development led by me, a passionate industry veteran who’s tired of ad businesses — and assisted by a few incredibly good-natured volunteers. Our goal is to help people live free from pain.
Your support, and especially your help getting the word out about the product to people who suffer with *or treat* RSI is essential. If you know someone who suffers with RSI, or who wants to ensure that they don’t someday — PLEASE tell them about it and send them to the the Discord to learn more.
If you want to support Svalboard financially, buy a sample cluster or a beer on the shop, or consider taking the plunge on a Lightly - the return policy is phenomenal, and the customer service rep is, like, SUPER handsome.
Love seeing the updates. Keep going mate love the project it's saving lives