Mini Dance-Dance-Revolution

Rewired part of PCB and worked on firmware. While looking at XIAO RP2040 diagrams, I realized that the SDA and SCL pins were not connected to the right spot. I swapped the connections for those pins and row 0 and row 1. I swapped out the switches in my CAD for the .STEP files in the official resources and spent some time defining the pins in the firmware.

Realigned components on the PCB and finished most of the CAD. While trying to align the switches on the PCB to the grid, I realized that the footprints were snapping to weird increments. Eventually, I decided to use the position values in the sidebar to manually set the x and y coordinates of the switches. I also moved the XIAO RP2040 to the right and the diodes further down for more room in the CAD. After finishing the cover plate, I modeled a simple knob for the rotary encoder.

Fixed small measurement errors, realigned the components, and worked on the cover piece. While I was working on the cover piece, I noticed a small piece sticking out, a sign of a slightly mismatched measurement. It turns out that most of my plates had small measurement errors (from slightly unconstrainted rectangles made while shortening one of the sides). While realigning my components, I learned that my PCB model had misplaced holes, which meant that I couldn’t trust it for measurements. I also lowered my rotary encoder so it wouldn’t clip into the top panel.

Aligned keycaps/OLED and edited case to better fit components. After working on the top plate for a while, I realized that a lot of my parts were clipping (e.g. diodes and microcontroller), so I cut away parts of the plate to make things fit. I improved my method for aligning components after having the align the keycaps on the switches (I spent a long time trying to align the original keycap to the origin before just calculating the displacement to where I needed it to be). After putting on the top plate, I raised part of the bottom plate to make a cutout for the USB-A port and raised the OLED screen. I also started working on the decorative top plate that’ll go onto top of everything.

Created PCB and started work on assembling in CAD. I had to scale down the amount of keys and remove the LEDs because there weren’t enough pins. I spent way too long searching for OLED and Rotary Encoder symbols while making the schematic before I realized that they just need the footprints paired with generic symbols from the default library. While routing the PCB, I learned that the red and blue wires are for different layers and assigned footprints to the diodes so they would show up (I forgot to do that while working on the schematic). After aligning most of the parts in Fusion, I realized that one of the switches and the rotary encoder were overlapping and that I could just export the PCB as a .step file from KiCad.