Wooting's Lekker Knob Large is way more than a volume wheel, coming to the 80 HE later this year

Wooting is nearly ready to ship the Lekker Knob Large, a programmable dial that replaces the four-key navigation cluster above the arrow keys on the 80 HE keyboard. The company expects it to land before the end of this year, though lead software engineer Simon Whyte is upfront that the timeline is a rough estimate.

The knob supports four programming modes in Wooting's Wootility software: Relative fires an action based on turn direction; Absolute locks the dial to a fixed value at each position; Zoned splits the knob into smaller slices, each triggering its own action when the centre button is pressed; and Analog ramps up input strength the further you turn. On top of that, programmable layers mean a plain turn does one thing, Ctrl + turn does another, and Ctrl + Alt + turn unlocks yet another action. Whyte also mentions the team is experimenting with using it as a steering wheel input in racing games — though he's clear that's still just an experiment. The whole project has been in development for three years.

The Lekker Knob Large is built specifically for the 80 HE — its form factor only fits that navigation key slot. Wooting is also working on a smaller, single-key-sized knob compatible with its other keyboards, but that one was kept under wraps at Computex and still has a long way to go.

This summer, Wooting is rolling out a Wootility update that lets all users remap keys to preset hotkeys, including Alt + F4 if you're feeling brave. Partnerships manager Max Janssen revealed the team plays Alt + F4 roulette with the new knob — nearly every Zoned slice gets an emoji, and one unlucky zone is mapped to Alt + F4. That update goes out to everyone, knob or not.