Hours: 22h

May 24

Hours: 1.5h

First pcb lol. I can't believe I made it this far without a single PCB. FRC, Infill ect.

Anyways, it's just a hackpad with a full pico and 100 buttons.

with 100 neopixels it gets complicated so barrel jack for power bc im not evan yu and i dont want to deal with USB PD.

I added a auto Polarity-correcting circuit so any barrel jack will work.

May 25

Hours: 2h

PCB layout done. Pretty basic. External PSU for LEDs and a RPI Pico.

I had to redo the schematic a lot of times because of kicad being weird. I crashed out.

May 26

Hours: 0.5h

Added OLED

Done!

May 27

Hours: 3h

Case design done. pretty basic. I just wanted to get it done.

Firmware done. just macros in kmk.

Lots of modifactions to the PCB. Because of sizing issues.

May 28

Hours: 2h BOM and redoing the PCB yet again. Getting JLC to work. I used the wrong footprint for the diodes 😭.

June 4

Hours: 1h BOM changes. Remvoed PCBA

June 6

Hours: 2h

I realized that I (may) need to level shift the data lines for the neopixels. Probably not needed but I will do it anyways since it is 100 neopixels and resistances + signal degradtaion might break things.

June 27

Hours: 4h

Soldering all the LEDs and the microcontroller.

Turns out I used way too much heat and too unevenly, so I warped the PCB and cracked multiple caps.

July 29

Hours: 2 So I lowkey got very busy with exams and stuff then hackathons then Undercity.

I removed all the cracked caps. Realized that other stuff was very wrong about the PCB. Like I messed it up. not in kicad but in real life.

July 30-31

Hours: 4 Fixing it up and debugging

So there are micro shorts everywhere, and when they heat up, they go from ~60k ohms to 1 ohms shorts, so rip. Freezer strats FTW.

Aug 2nd

It works bodge wired except for a couple of keys. The case doesn't fit. Demo time.