forever enamored with microcontrollers and their potential as a hobbyist, i’ve been dipping my toes into them again. at the same time, going straight to pcb designing on easyEDA. i designed 3 pcb things in an autistic super focus episode and I just want to talk about em.

microcontroller of choice, the rp2040

in the past I always chose whatever i could find on amazon or even aliexpress but have now seen the true way. clones, while affordable and in lots dont have the support and documentation that some board companies like the pi foundation have.

the last pro micro clones i bought (and never really ended up using) really only had a pinout diagram and foreign datasheet without much helpful info. so this time I went ahead and bought a few pi picos and rp2040-zero.

with those i have the choice of going micropython or c/c++ (tho im sure you can fenagle that kind of thing on anything), the point being that its supported and i’ll be finding help if i look for it (i know nothing about embedded software design)

device 1: an 8 key keyboard

i found out about these things called chorded keyboards, where people can type with key combos and felt like I could make one using the pi pico and make something like a typing game.

there’s a whole variety of chorded keyboard projects out there and i cant quite find the one i was basing mine off of but since i had a few more empty pins, i added 3 leds and pots

didn’t have any headers to solder the pico onto the pcb so had to cut and solder smaller wires together.

tamagotchi-like

another device i designed was for a small game using a waveshare 1.5″ display and the rp2040-zero to keep it on the smaller side.

i’ve always wanted to make such a thing. but when it comes to this kind of project, everyone wants to make a wifi-sniffer or some kind function-based device and i honestly just want to make a tamagotchi clone.

something i didn’t take into account was actually getting graphics done for this. the display comes packaged with some example code and in it is a method for printing text and basic shapes… but i’ll have to learn or find a way to get tiles/sprites on it.

the roguelike

last device, i wanted to learn more about keyboard matrixes and figuring that roguelikes wouldn’t need high fps/performance to enjoy, it would be perfect for such a device.

so far the only software ive made is something like a basic shmup to make sure my basic schematic works and have yet to actually code up something for these things.

but yeah thats what i was messing around with sometimes when the internet was down during the most recent hurricane. until next time!