It’s been a while since I posted a devlog. I just got a bit busy but I guess it is time to sum up everything in I have done in the past few days! After finishing the guide hackpad, I took it upon myself to build my own custom hackpad (name pending). To begin, I went into Kicad’s schematics editor and created a schematic, using a matrix (thank you Gemini for teaching me what it is). I settled on a 3x3 keyboard with two dials, and after fiddling around with the layout and wiring and footprints and all that fun stuff, I was able to go to the PCB editor. This is where I spent the most amount of time. I spent about a day working through layouts of the LEDs, diodes, switches, and the Seeeduino. After that day, I tackled wiring everything up, and learned about vias. I don’t know what we’d do without them… they’re so helpful. I thought I was all good once I finished wiring things up… until I opened the DRC and ran it to find 500 errors. After changing some of the constraints, and realizing that I should make my 5V wire a bit wider, I managed to get the DRC down to around 100 errors, most of them being clearance errors. I spent a third day just fixing those and getting it down to 9 errors, all of which being simple silkscreen warnings. I also realized that my LEDs were existing in the same place as my switches, so I had to go back and redo ALL of the wiring for those, and then realized I was using the wrong footprint, and then I once more had to go back and redo all the wiring (lots of fun), but once I did that and fixed some issues with Edge.cuts, my PCB was all good to go! Finally we get to today, where I exported my PCB and put it into Fusion360, and drew and extruded the base and walls of the case (standoffs tomorrow).

Also I don’t know why it only says I logged 3 hours, I’ve logged around 8 since my last post…