1/23/2026 8:35 PM - Soldered LEDS and diodes

Before putting on switches, I soldered on the rp2040, leds and diodes. I was able to test how the leds worked, and they were great. From previous experience, I made sure to pre-tin all the pads, since the first time I tried soldering these LEDS, none of them worked because I forgot to do that.

I wrote a simple script to run rgb on all 12 leds, just to make sure they work. Nothing to difficult there.

My PCB design also had the led pads wrong, so I had to cut a trace and bring a wire to the other end. I basically reversed the din and dout, so they were all connected fine, other than the first/last one.

1/23/2026 8:40 PM - Soldered Switches and OLED

After making sure the leds worked, I soldered on the switches and oled.

In terms of the oled, I spent quite a while bending the pins to make sure that it would sit flush with the case.
The case actually had a little section that stuck out too much, so I just chopped it off.
After putting it into the case, the keycaps looked nice, but I decided to temporarily replace it with my other ones just to see how they would look.

1/23/2026 8:42 PM - LED + Switch Firmware

The firmware took quite a long time to write, partly because I wrote it in notepad, and partly because I wanted it to be fancy.

I wanted the switches to make the leds surrounding the switch pulse, so it took a long time to figure out how to do that without blocking the main thread. I ended up using a dict to count how long each led had to stay on, which would be set to different amounts based on whether it was under the switch or a neighbor.

1/23/2026 9 PM - OLED Status updates

I wanted the OLED to monitor my computers vitals (ram,cpu,gpu,temp,etc). I added some code that would read from the serial and output values.

Then, I needed to write a python script that puts these values onto the serial monitor.

I eventually switched to micropython to utilize both cores + make updates faster.

Notes: this only works for intel cpu + gpu, may need tweaks for other hardware

1/24/2026 1 AM - back to circuitpython

turns out micropython is bad when i need to use keyboard + serial. so, i had to move back to circuitpython + slightly worse keypressing.

Also, I kinda gave up on system stats. Everything I tried, from hwinfo to open hardware monitor would not work, and debugging with serial was too much of a chore. Instead, it just has a cat there instead.

No image, but I was able to finally get an animation playing.
IT was so annoying I turned to AI for help, which did not help (actually took 4 hours)

Now I need to figure out how to make the gif's lines more defined(should be quick)

1/24/2026 4 PM - Finally got OLED to work

After rewriting the gif converter to give me frames in bmp files, I was finally able to make the oled display the gif. The gif is from here btw: https://www.pixilart.com/art/bongo-cat-78caef9cd7ccd97

It automatically centers the gif and flips the colors since the OLED is inverted? Not sure why it is but it worked so I'll leave it.

1/24/2026 6 PM - Merged Code Together

I rewrote all the code, merging everything together. I made classes for each section of the hackpad, and measured how long it took each segment to run. Then, I could set proper refresh rates for each unit of the hackpad. (neopixels, button scanning, oled)

Keyscanning code:

Neopixel code:

OLED code:

The OLED updates run every 0.05 seconds just because it takes a bit longer, and the delay is barely noticeable at that rate.

Looking at update times, it is already very fast.

After some tweaking, I came to a good middle ground. 4fps animation + somewhat smooth leds. Its not great, but since i cant use both cores with circuitpython and micropython is just clunky, this will suffice for now.