Monster macropad devlog3

While my previous macropad was basically complete from my last devlog, I thought of adding a battery so that my macropad wouldn’t need to be wired to run and I could upload a game like the google dinosaur game to it and play on its on… but this led me down a path of wanting to add more and more.

This new macropad (if it works) features these:
9 Standard Keyboard Buttons
2 Joysticks
1 Rotary Encoder Switch
1 OLED Screen
2 JST Ports
1 Sound Speaker
1 Camera

To accomodate these features I used:
1 Seeduino XIAO ESP32 S3 PLUS (lots of ports & camera capabilities)
1 I/O Expander for even more ports (it was needed.)
3 Low Dropout Regulator (LDO) - drops voltages
1 Voltage Booster - raises voltages (for the servos)

And along the way I learned about:

• physical pullup resistors
• inductors
• different grades of diodes
• I2C communication
• Battery Management Systems / Circuits
• when to use different ratings for components
• all of the above in this entire post

Currently I haven’t added the JST connectors for servos nor the speaker but I will do so in the next session.

Also I ran ERC and got a bunch of errors so I will need to figure out why as well. I haven’t been able to get my schematic checked yet…
Having done my first version of the macropad makes this process much faster though!