Ziptyze, the creator of the Zlant, brings us a new microcontroller that is fully castellated and any PCB can be designed to use it where it normally place two keys in the top row.
It means no more unnecessarily chunky cases for designs that require a microcontroller like a Pro Micro.
Hopefully no relation to the Zune
100% Microsoft free 
Seems like a good evolution of LifeIsOnTheWire’s postage board for DIY PCBs
Would this not result in two keys being like a millimeter and a half taller than the rest? Seems a bit odd to me, but maybe I’m missing something?
I always thought projects like this was so there would be a stable platform for the USB port & Microcontroller in an otherwise handwire’d build 
@iaman check out the album. The PCB has a cutout for this little baby one to sit in.
@Manofinterests You can design a PCB that uses through hole components without adding extra height for a promicro and having to source and solder port/controller/etc if you use this.
It sits completely flush with the PCB, not on top of it. there is a rectangle cut out of the PCB and this goes into the rectangle. It attaches via the castellations around the perimeter of the board. There is no difference in height for key switches.
Ohhh, that makes sense. Love it!
Yeh this is really cool. I hope the design gets open sourced, I couldn’t see any source files anywhere, it’d make a fun “my 1st smd” project and would really help it to gain traction if vendors could produce and stock them.
Photos of how Rune fits into ZlantXL build:
https://imgur.com/a/rMfiIzN
Pretty neat.
Freaking brilliant. I agree with peejeh, I hope it’ll be open-source.
it seems cool but won’t castellations increase the cost of PCB manufacturing?
So looking at the ZlantXL build that @donpark posted, this seems cool for DIY projects moreso than full projects? I can’t see where having a castellation’d and separated microcontroller would be cheaper for manufacturing costs since all PCBs would have to have a separate “rune compatible” version to work with this.
It’s designed to compete with pro micros. Yes the PCB has to be designed for it; however it is easier to design for this than to put the components on the PCB. Let’s you design PCBs without having to worry about USB power, ground planes, ESD protection, etc.
I don’t think so and there aren’t that many castellations. Even at 25 cents a pop it would work out to like 4 bucks, but I bet it’s even less than that.
I think the cheaper aspect is that you don’t have to buy/solder those annoying pin headers to the promicro and then the PCB, this allows for the thinness and sleekness of an integrated mcu, while allowing people to keep their PCB costs the same as it would be for a promicro based device.