A Macropad (Update 2)

After waiting for a few days, my parts finally arrived. I ordered 5 EC11 Rotary Encoders, 10 Holy Panda Switches,k, 50 SK6812 Mini E and 10 Gateron Hot Swap Sockets for my printed circuit board, which also arrived. But. That was when all the problems hit me

Problem 1

I placed all the switches onto the PCB without soldering them yet. I took the keycaps from my keyboard and realised that I spaced them too closely. After researching for a few minutes, I found out that the gap between each switch (comparing the middle of a switch to the other) was too tiny; it was 17.50mm spaced apart, although it should be 19.05mm. At first, I though that it is fine but then I realised that I added hotswap sockets to make it customised so if i limit the users to only use my keycaps for that spacing, the customisability is gone.

Problem 2

The LEDs, I did not take note of whether the PCB layout for the soldering of the LED was accurate and I realised that the layout of the LED with the PCB was wrong, all the contact points had to move to another position to match with the LED, this was truly a painful discovery as this small little problem needed me to order a brand new circuit board. After doing even more research, I realised that the footprint I used for the LEDs was wrong, which is why they never matched up. Turns out, there is a difference between SK6812 Mini LED and SK6812 Mini LED E. I bought the one with the E but used the footprint of the one without the E. I could have just bought the one without the E, but I had circuit changes anyway.

The fixed

I fixed all of the above problems and also improved the layout, added another switch and rotary encoder to the circuit to maximise space efficiency. Lastly, I also added a resistor for the LED to protect against flickering lights and weird things happening.

That's it for now. Stay tuned for more updates!