You don't have to desolder the ribbon cable. You could use some sort of ribbon cable connector, if you have one available. But I found it more practical to only have the wires I needed. And desoldering the ribbon cable was fairly straightforward.
The piantor looks like a nice piece of kit! Unfortunately the PCB doesn't seem to have any holes to accommodate a trackpoint. There even seems to be a trace right between the YUHJ keys, so drilling a hole is not possible either.
Thanks! I paid $28.55 per SK8707 module + shipping (around $22 to Norway).
Yes, you're right, I changed the PIO driver directly for that: https://github.com/joh/qmk_firmware/commit/aa0214f5b1b3001cf7cc99419c32c8b87707cb5a
I plan to make it an optional feature for qmk proper, but for now it's somewhat of a hack :)
crkbd trackpoint
![](https://lemmy.world/pictrs/image/dc80d829-6a9b-45f7-b5ee-8ff10731c07f.jpeg?format=webp&thumbnail=128)
![](https://lemmy.world/pictrs/image/dc80d829-6a9b-45f7-b5ee-8ff10731c07f.jpeg?format=webp)
I added a trackpoint to a corne-cherry (crkbd) keyboard for ergonomic pointing bliss!
Build details: https://github.com/joh/crkbd-trackpoint