StarDeck - I ADDED LEDSSS YESSS

this took way longer than it should’ve lol

well, i’ve finally wired up the LEDs to the xiao, hopefully with the way i’ve placed them, it’ll make for some nice backlighting!

what could I possibly have been doing for 1 hour?
no clue, honestly. probably just moving stuff around lol cause I was switching between designs a lot, finally settled on this design (2nd image i think) but I have no clue where the xiao should go, cause ideally it would be at the top but that’s where the screen is and on kicad it keeps flashing red everytime I try putting it there (trying to place it like the 4th image). I’ll try figure out if that’s an issue or just kicad being annoying. but all in all, a pretty annoying week on this project lol.

StarDeck - pin HELL on my schema right now

Like many others, I want to make the most of the hackpad funding.

However, considering I have no hardware experience (and hence have no idea what other parts to buy, if any), I am limited to the kit’s contents at the moment. So, I have spent the last two hours, while sorting out some wiring, how to optimise my pin usage so that I can have a good amount of components while keeping a good design.

Now, my current design uses 7 keys and 1 rotary encoder. This, as you can probably see from my PCB screenshot, is not too symmetrical. This has been bugging me since I started this. So with some help from the slack, I added the rotary encoder to the key matrix (hopefully correctly), and have saved a total of…. 1 pin!

Now this isn’t enough to add a second rotary encoder, based on my current design, so I am desperately looking for a way to save one more pin so my design doesn’t look lopsided, but if worst comes to worst, I’ll just change up the layout honestly, maybe have 5 keys on the bottom, then 2 keys and the rotary encoder on the top, then the screen above that (as I’m writing this, I have realised that this isn’t a bad idea).

Anyways, as always, if you have any suggestions PLEASE PLEASE LET ME KNOW I NEED YOUR HELP and I will be spending the rest of my time researching and asking people, trying to find any way to get a second rotary encoder.

Well, at least its not the end of the world if I don’t have two.

StarDeck - building a cool macropad with ZERO prior hardware experience

So, not sure if you can tell by my projects, but I work mainly in software. This project has already been driving me nuts, and claude has been… a bit less than useful so I’ve decided to just firm it and figure it out myself.

To be fair, a lot of the timelapse for today was just me referring to the guide half the time, but I got it (I think??) in the end and have finished the schema, only thing left is to add the footprints which I cannot figure out for the life of me, #hackpad here I come!

I thought this would be a fun challenge cause I’ve always wanted a streamdeck or utility keyboard of sorts, and being able to make my own personal one just makes the end product fit my needs better. So far, I have 7 keys, an LCD screen, and a rotary encoder which I hope are wired up correctly. I am thinking of replacing one key with another rotary encoder and adding 3 more keys to keep the shape, but I’m kinda limited on pins and am not planning on buying a GPIO expander (I think that’s what they are, someone mentioned it to me). More wiring is jus t gonna be harder for me to understand, so I might just keep it at one rotary encoder, or have two and just replace a key. That would give me 6 keys and two rotary encoders which is more symmetrical.

Anyways, that paragraph was just a dump of my thoughts, but yeah here’s the current schema!