@KrishangGupta

So today I modified the pc I designed the case And I’m all done Hackpad is ready The only thing left is My account verification I have uploaded documents today As soon as they will get verified I will upload my files and I hope That it will get Accepted and I will get my hardware soon

Today I pulled all nighter And I was struggling with the Case designing And today Finish it but I was recording it on lapse I don’t know what happened I had a power cut And I can’t upload that recording now But yes Finished Case designing And I did some modifications in the PCB And yes my project is done I am very excited to get the parts and Assemble it And finish it up.

Man, what a day; but at least the job is done: finished my macropad PCB.

I started the process with high hopes. The matrix routing seemed perfect. However, soon enough I realized how careless I had been, spacing the switches not 19.05 mm from each other. Otherwise, the physical keycaps would just rub against one another. So, what could I do except stopping, scrubbing off all the tracks, and putting the switches together again in a perfectly straight line?

Then came the rotary encoder. This thing simply wouldn’t sit where I wanted it to be, so I had to zoom in and align it manually.

Afterwards, however, everything else went smoothly. I adjusted the routing, attached the connections between XIAO and OLED, and added some cool effect using something called “copper pour”. In case you were wondering, this procedure implies flooding the whole board with ground planes.

The most rewarding moment of today was passing DRC tests without any issues. Sure, they complained about several close clearances, but once I played around with the parameters and cleaned out some of those hard-to-see ghost lines, I got nothing but a beautiful green screen. Time to archive my work and move to manufacture stage!

Schematic Logic & Physical PCB Layout Complete!

Today was a massive build day for KG’s HACKPAD. I completely finished the electrical schematic and made the jump into the physical PCB design phase in KiCad.

Here is what I engineered today:

Mapped the brain: Wired the Seeed Studio XIAO RP2040 to handle a 3x3 mechanical switch matrix, utilizing a COL2ROW diode orientation to prevent ghosting.

Routed the peripherals: Hooked up the EC11 Rotary Encoder (pins D9/D10), an I2C SSD1306 OLED screen (D4/D5), and the data line for the SK6812 RGB underglow (D8).

Cleared the ERC: Resolved all unconnected pins, established the no-connect flags, and locked in the power flags for a flawless 0-error schematic check.

Built the physical layout: Pushed the 3D footprints to the PCB editor, established a custom 19.05mm grid (the golden rule for mechanical switches to prevent keycap collision), and snapped my 8 switches and the encoder into a mathematically perfect 3x3 square.

The logic is locked in, and the physical footprints are perfectly placed. Next up is routing the actual copper traces to connect everything!