2/21/2026 - Recieved, organised, and started soldering components!

Here's all the parts (and the PCB) I received and will be using:

I soldered the header pins onto the XIAO chip. This was my first time soldering, so it took some effort to get used to it and apply the correct amount on the correct location.

Then, I soldered all diodes onto the PCB and cut off the excess.

2/22/2026 - Soldered the board and switches onto the PCB.

Today was much less smooth-sailing than yesterday. I soldered the board's headers onto the PCB fine, and I soldered the switches fine:

But then, when trying to solder the SK6812 LEDs, I was struggling, I had to search up tutorials and still couldn't do it easily. In the process, I ended up melting the plastic off two LEDs to the point where they were unusable, and accidentally melted some of the plastic on the side of one of the switches on the board, RIP 😭. I managed to remove all the mess I made on the LED area with just some flux residue left to memorialize my pain, but I wasn't able to remove the switch to replace it. Since the switch still worked, I gave up and let it be there.

By the way, after sending my design in, I realized a flaw with my design. The LEDs are on the PCB which is far from the top of the case, so the holes in the case are basically pointless, since if one LED is on, it'll shine through all the holes anyway. Given this reason as well as how difficult it was being to solder them on, I gave up with the LEDs.

On that sad note, the soldering is done! Time to assemble the macropad and upload the firmware to test it! Hopefully this goes well 😅

2/24/2026 - Debugged firmware and FINISHED THE BUILD

ITS OVER!!!! I used the KMK keyboard firmware and it took some time to setup and debug. Here's some of the problems I faced during it:

• At first I was using an old version of CircuitPython and I couldn't install asyncio, so I had to update it and install the necessary packages
• It turns out I had soldered the diodes backwards, but thankfully, I could just swap from "COL2ROW" to "ROW2COL" and it would work fine.
• When soldering the XIAO to the board, I had accidentally joined GPIO0 (the pin for COL3) to the metal slab in the middle of the chip, which was grounded. I had to melt the solder and separate them so the pin would work again.
• The case I designed and got 3D printed was slightly off, size-wise, and so, the top gets slightly bent when screwed on top, even loosely. (You can see that in the last two pictures)

But other than all of that, it was smooth sailing, and I got the firmware setup and working!! 🔥🔥