If you use a Mac laptop to do things like OpenSCAD, Bambu Studio, FreeCAD, and QCAD, you might be like me and find the touchpad very annoying when it comes to moving about in 3D space in your render area. A while back I bought the stuff and built this Adafruit Macropad:
In a word, I love this guy. The 3D printable case is a work of art, and the rotary encoder wheel is HEAVY. The only thing they left out of the build that it needs, IMHO, is a set of silicone feet stuck to the bottom and it stays where you put it and just “feels” great.
The drawback is having to literally code the thing to make it do anything. My Python is weak and I sat on two of these for like a couple years after building them because I could never get around to learning enough to make them work. Enter Claude. In just a few minutes I had a working config for Bambu Studio. But I wanted a selectable config situation and didn’t want to do it with hidden key combinations. So that left a toolbar app. So I had Claude write that, too. Along the way I did configs for OpenSCAD, FreeCAD, and QCAD as well.
So if you build one (or more!) of these to use on a Mac, I’ve got software for you here:
The app is signed and notarized if you install it from either downloading the DMG or using home-brew. When you run it, the default is to unmount your macropad if it’s mounted (I got sick of forgetting to unmount it), but the menu for the Macropad Switcher app will let you mount it back if you want. And you can turn off unmounting by default, too. The README will tell you what the buttons do, but I found my layout to make sense once you get used to it. At some point soon I hope to get some time to see about printing actual labeled keycaps, but for now I’ve got it down pretty good so it’s no big deal.
Suggestions and bugs welcome for anyone who decides to give it a go. I find it really useful over trying to use a single button trackpad for this stuff. Oh, you will have to manually add the app to your login situation if you want it to run at boot time. Enjoy!
