LG Hackpad - Stardance

Ship #1 Pending review

I made the LG Hackpad — a 9-key mechanical macropad with a rotary encoder and an OLED display, built around the Seeed XIAO RP2040.

I designed the schematic and the 2-layer PCB completely from scratch in KiCad (my first PCB ever) and the case in Tinkercad — an open tray design with the XIAO exposed and an anti-flex support grid under the board, printable without supports. On the software side I built CircuitPython firmware where the encoder browses through profiles on the OLED, and a desktop configurator app (Python + CustomTkinter) that lets you assign a key combo or a custom script to every one of the 9 keys.

Most challenging: hand-routing a 2-layer board without crossing nets while keeping a clean GND pour, and fitting everything under 100x100mm. I'm proud that I designed the whole hardware myself as a first-timer.

To check it out: the repo has the full README, BOM, KiCad files, gerbers, the case as STL + STEP, the firmware and the configurator app. The demo link shows the 3D case model in Tinkercad.

2 devlogs
8h build
Hackpad

Video of Project → See source code →

Open comments for this post

@lucas_g on LG Hackpad · 27 days ago

43m 41s logged

Just finished setting up my account, converting stl files to .step ones and I added a demo URL to my project.

Open comments for this post

@lucas_g on LG Hackpad · 27 days ago

7h 4m 7s logged

Finished my LG Hackpad! 🎉

This is a 9-key mechanical macropad with a rotary encoder and an OLED display, built around the Seeed XIAO RP2040.

What I did:

Designed the schematic and the 2-layer PCB completely from scratch in KiCad (my first PCB ever!). Hand-routed the switch matrix with per-key 1N4148 diodes, added a GND pour and fitted everything under 100x100mm (final: 68x99.68mm).
Designed the case in Tinkercad: an open tray design with the XIAO RP2040 exposed, an anti-flex support grid under the PCB, USB cutout and 4x M2 standoffs - printable without supports.
Built the firmware (CircuitPython): the encoder browses through profiles on the OLED, and each of the 9 keys is freely configurable via a JSON config.
Made a desktop configurator app (Python + CustomTkinter) to assign key combos or custom scripts to every key.

Biggest challenge as a first-timer: hand-routing a 2-layer board without crossing nets while keeping a clean GND pour. Super happy
with how it turned out!