For previous projects I have spent a lot of time soldering some makeshift breadboards together. The results have been ok but the boards tend to get messy and intricate. Something I have wanted to try for a while is designing a custom circuit board to simplify the process. This custom macro pad felt like the perfect project to try setting this up. The board was made using a kb2040 microcontroller and coded using CircuitPython with KMK. To tie everything together I designed and printed out a case to house the electronics. Check out the github repository for this project where all of the files for this project are located.
The project was inspired by this build here.
EagleCAD made designing the board relatively easy to do. The first step was making sure I had layouts for everything that gets soldered to the board (i.e. keys, microcontroller, etc.). Once all of the parts were spaced out on the layout, all that's left is to connect all the parts of the circuit. Just make sure that none of the wires cross before you order the board. There are a bunch of options out there that will fabricate and ship out these circuit board designs for cheap.
The boards turned out great and I definitely plan on doing this again for a future project.
