As seems to be becoming a yearly tradition, I spent this holiday season designing a PCB, an ortholinear PCB for the Argyle.
I impulse grabbed an Argyle from Jae’s left over stock in the end of year sales. I’d followed the project from its inception, and although the design itself isn’t anything special and doesn’t speak to me, and I couldn’t justify the GB cost, the price was too good to pass up.
Ortho for life, so of course I’m not going to build the staggered PCB but instead build an ortholinear PCB and plate while trying to stay true to the THT aesthetic of @Seoulcialite’s original. I’m not familiar with the IO expander, as far as I understand it in effect makes the firmware work like a split board. So instead I am going with a so-called Japanese matrix, this basically means running diodes in both directions enabling twice the number of switches with the same number of matrix pins.
It’s still early days, I’ve breadboard tested the matrix and firmware (QMK doesn’t support a Japanese matrix out of the box), but I need to get some WS2812b LEDs and give them a test to make sure I understand how they work.