Adept is a device sold by Ploopy, a small company working on open-source hardware.
The Adept is a trackball similar to something like a Kensington SlimBlade. Since it’s open-source, the folks at Ploopy maintain a Github repo that contains all the files necessary to recreate the device. I however, lack both the equipment (3D printer & soldering iron) and the skill to build something like this myself.
I bought an assembled kit directly from them, which arrived in about two weeks. Once I got it I wanted to modify the keymap/firmware in order to enable something called drag-scroll toggle.
By default the firmware is compatible with VIA which allows for easy remapping. But in order for the drag-scroll button to act as a toggle rather than a switch a separate firmware needed to be loaded on to the device.
Ploopy takes advantage of .uf2 files for firmware which
seem to automatically install themselves when copied onto the device.
They provide four different firmwares varying by drag-scroll sensitivity on their repo.
But when I first tried to install these I detected no change in the device.
In order to try to address this I opted to build the firmware myself using QMK.
Since I setup my current split keyboard with QMK I have switched to nixos.
I first attempted to take advantage of the shell.nix included in the QMK repo.
Which started a long compilation of the QMK framework.
While waiting for that to finish I found out that QMK provides docker images and helper scripts
to run.
So once I enabled docker on my machine I proceeded with that.
Building the firmware followed the instructions provided by Ploopy and QMK but with a prepended helper script:
util/docker_cmd.sh make ploopyco/madromys/rev1_001:via.
I copied over the resulting .uf2 file and detected no change.
In order to achieve what I wanted I commented out 3 lines from madromys.c.
This achieved what I wanted and allowed the drag-scroll button to act as a toggle.
If I have time I may add a dedicated madromys/keymap to my qmk fork.
I think there should be some way to achieve what I did without editing the source, possibly with an #undef?
Or figure out how qmk_userspace works to separate my config from the main repo.