Before committing to ordering the boards and associated costs, I though I better test the keyboard circuit design. I removed all of the hard to solder components and replaced them with a BlackPill Dev Board (exactly the same electronics as my board).

This only leaves the larger components, Diodes, RGB Leds and Hot-swappable connectors which most of us should be able to handle with a good soldering (I use a KSGER which I highly recommend).

This extra step (proof of concept) before spending money only to find I made a mistake with the layout, code or both, is not essential but realistically it's probably necessary considering the complexity involved.

So to conclude, the new board is basically the same except we now use a Blackpill for the electronics and it now includes a rotary encode (for volume and RGB dimming). It should be much easier to build and program...

Once testing is done (not sure if some of GPIO's I used are problematic), I can continue with the embedded version... See project log for update, there are a few...

Image:

Mike