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!