Makroboard

Leoboard

A makroboard I designed as a christmas present and my first project using 3d printing / cad design. You can find the case design on onshape under: https://cad.onshape.com/documents/f016138659585157d187dc39/w/5da7c9f47346b58de636040e/e/736dc8079a6dc26abaf89305?renderMode=0&uiState=69bc84548cc73f69bd25787e

Features

• 6 MX Style switches
• buzzer (for sound)
• rotary encoder
• rgb leds
• rp2040 based

Note: The code folder also includes kmk and the necessary addons, so it can be directly flashed to the rp2040.

Standard key binds

The board has 3 switchable layers:

The story

One day as I was editing a video for the video club at my school (check out the yt channel), I was annoyed by the standard key assignments of Premiere Pro. Especially using the arrow keys to seek through frames manually (i.e. for finding the excact startframe of a clip) is a really slow process, so I thought, wouldn't it be cool to have a rotary knob for that and then also to have a special key set for directly placing cuts and zooming in the timeline?

So I the idea to design my own macroboard was born. I found a nice starting tutorial on the hackclub blueprint website, which showed the ground ideas of macroboard design. As it was just two weeks before christmas back then, I thought it would also be cool to use the board as a christmas present.

So I got started with the pcb design using kicad. The design itself is based on the seed xiao rp2040 devboard, as it is the perfect size and also quite cheap. Additionally to my initial requirements (switches and rotary encoder), I came up with the idea to also add leds for light and a buzzer for playing startup sounds.

Then I designed the pcb board and searched in the jlcpcb parts library for suiting (and cheap) parts.

As the order was on its way, I started designing the case using onshape.

I also created an assembled model in onshape, to test the dimensions.

After printing and assembling the final macropads, I learned that, it's not good to make the inner dimensions of your case exactly like the dimensions of your board ;) , but fortunately, I printed everything in pla, so after some heating using a hair dryer, I could fit the pcb inside.

I then wrote a script for it, using kmk, as I liked the idea of being able to quickly change some configurations, without having to recompile. @SillyGoose123 is also currently working on a more powerful, rust-based firmware for the board with a web based settings interface, check it out here.

A big thanks to my cs teacher for letting me print out the cases using the 3dprinter in his office and to @SillyGoose123 for printing out the keycaps.