12/31/2025 2 AM - Soldered and programmed the board

So I have had a soldering iron, but haven't used it in a while, lol, so I had to watch a couple of tutorials to give myself a refresher. After some practice on some scrap PCB boards, I soldered the Seeed XIAO RP2040, 5 switches, rotary encoder, and OLED screen to the PCB. After checking connections with a multimeter, everything seemed to be wired correctly. Soldering the components to the board took ~1 hour.

After I got everything soldered, it was time to make the firmware :,)
I attempted to learn and code it with KMK as I had originally planned, but I ended up not really liking it and decided to move on and try QMK instead. I noticed it had a bit of a larger community, so that helped a lot. I started to look at some of the documentation and stuff from other users for a while, but it honestly still confused me so much. I had a bit of experience with the C programming language, but not much, so this was a huge challenge for me. Over the course of a couple of days, I continued to program it to do what I wanted, and oh boy, it was a disaster. There were so many bug fixes and errors that I had to go through for this. After a very painful week of trying to program this thing, I finally got it done to a satisfactory level. I ended up doing the following key layout:
3 "layers/layouts," which you can switch between by clicking the rotary encoder.
Layer 1:
key 1: F13
key 2: F14
key 3: F15
key 4: F16
key 5: F17
Rotary Encoder clockwise: "[" key
Rotary Encoder counterclockwise: "]" key
Layer 2:
key 1: F18
key 2: F19
key 3: F20
key 4: F21
key 5: F22
Rotary Encoder clockwise: Up arrow key
Rotary Encoder counterclockwise: Down arrow key
Layer 3:
key 1: F23
key 2: F24
key 3: Media previous track
key 4: Media pause
key 5: Media next track
Rotary Encoder clockwise: Volume up
Rotary Encoder counterclockwise: Volume down

My reasoning for most of the keys being F13-F24 keys are because I don't actually use them at all, and I can remap them to other keys pretty easily using a program like PowerToys. Unfortunately, I wasn't able to get my OLED screen to work, despite trying for hours. I will definitely continue to work on this in the future, but I wanted to get a journal entry done lol. All together, programming took ~12-ish hours over the course of a week.

I also had to make some quick modifications to the 3d model of my case since I had done some math incorrectly on the spacing of certain things. My case is currently printing during the time of writing this, so I'll make one more journal entry for that and the full assembly. CAD edits took <1 hour.

Overall, I think my Macropad was an amazing project, and I definitely learned so much from all of it. I've been using it every day for things like digital art, gaming, music, etc. It's definitely been very helpful and inspired me to create more projects like it. For now, here's a photo of the top of my (nearly) completed macropad :)

12/31/2025 10 AM - Finished the macropad :)

I woke up today to find that the 3D printed case was complete, and I took a couple of minutes to assemble it. I am at a point where I am satisfied with the work I've done and consider it a complete project. This was so much fun, thanks for all of it :)

1/2/2026 - Accidentally submitted again

I didn't mean to submit this for review again lol, sorry! I just now realized I did! .