It’s been a while since I did anything with this keyboard (except to type on it every day all day), and I recently had insomnia again — and when that happens I like to design PCBs. I avoided getting too deep in the rabbit hole of keyboard addons like knobs, joysticks, extra buttons, speakers, screens, USB hubs and so on, by simply leaving empty space on the board and breaking out all the unused pins on a header. together with power. The idea is that I can make much smaller (and cheaper) modules to plug into that to experiment with all kinds of addons. This turned out to be a great decision, because it let me just go ahead with making the keyboard, and leave worrying about all the other stuff for later. Tonight I decided now is the time, and designed the first module:
It’s simple enough: an encoder, a joystick, two buttons, and a bunch od LEDs on the underside, for backlight. I ran out of free pins for controlling the light, so I just put them on a physical switch instead (in retrospect, I should have also added a potentiometer for dimming).
The PCB is ordered, we will see how well that works when it arrives in a week or two.