In my infinite wisdom and attention to detail, I managed to mix up top/bottom sides of the RP2040 pro-micro controllers in my Sofle v2 kit.

After soldering up and connecting power, only 2/3 of the LEDs are lit, different spots on L/R boards. All LEDS are pretty evenly illuminated.

I've given everything a good inspection and can't see any bad solder joints and theres no issue with the keys.

I'm wondering whether I've damaged the drivers on the controllers and need to replace them. Sigh.

For now, the LEDs remain off and I'm slowly working up my typing speed, quite fun with the layout tinkering too.

I got my PCBs for my custom board yesterday. I'm waiting on a switch sampler set so i can figure out what switches i want.

I have a good idea of where the trackpoint should go and i put a hole in the PCB for the stem to go through, but that's the only change i've made for it.

Sure enough, i could just fit the Pico on the middle pad if i move some diodes. I still think putting it under the PCB and hand wiring it will be neater and make the trackpoint easier to wire, but thanks for pointing out that possibility.

3V3 is the 3.3V supply. The others are going to be power supplies for other things that you don't need to worry about. E.g. VBUS might be the 5V USB (actually I checked and it is; VSYS seems to be the input voltage).

For simple switches the only pins you need are 3V3, GPIOs and ground. Leave everything else disconnected.

I'm no electrical engineer, but I have made a bunch of boards with Pi Picos and done a couple of PCB designs of questionable but usable quality. My second one mounts the Pico dev board directly to my PCB. The first one needed a ribbon cable that was then split to reach the MCU.

Somebody on the .ml thread has already gone over the basics of what the pins all do. For the main matrix of the keyboard, you don't need anything except GPIO, not even Ground. Each row gets a GPIO pin, and each column gets a GPIO pin. The firmware -- KMK, QMK, ZMK, etc. -- will handle it from there. It should even automatically treat the pico's combo pins as digital GPIO due to your specifying them in the code. I haven't looked at the pinout of the various trackpoint modules that are out there, but you'll probably need either 5v or 3.3v power, a ground, and 2-4 GPIO pins.

If you're getting a PCB fabricated and want to keep your options open on sourcing various modules (or not using them at all), then I think you're on the right track with hand-wiring it. I'm a big proponent of making something that will work and that you understand, and growing from there, rather than trying to make your first PCB all things it might ever need to be and getting frustrated when it isn't perfect. If you wanted to do something just to make it a bit more polished, though, you could make your best estimation about where you want your trackpoint, and then run some traces to vias so that you could keep the wiring you have to do very short and clean, maybe even to the point where you could just use headers on the module.

One final note is that a Pico's headers are just widely spaced enough that you can place them between three linearly spaced keys (e.g. your middle three). It makes running the traces a bit of an ass-ache, and you need to make sure you assemble things in the right order (solder headers, solder switches, then solder MCU) but it can be done. More sophisticated designs do away with a dev board altogether and integrate the MCU chip itself and the other necessary components onto the keyboard's PCB, but I'm not at the point where I feel comfortable trying that yet.

Have a look at the Pinout guides, and you should get in the habit of reading datasheets. They usually will have reference designs for the power delivery (pins like vcc, vsys, etc). Also most gpio pins will have multiple functions depending on the use case, and some pins may have more or different features. Sounds like with your particular setup, you'll just need basic digital pins, but if you wanted to add features like RGB backlights or an analog input of some kind like for volume control, you may need to take advantage of either a high speed data pin (for the LEDs) or an ADC pin for the analog sensing.

https://datasheets.raspberrypi.com/pico/Pico-R3-A4-Pinout.pdf

https://datasheets.raspberrypi.com/pico/pico-datasheet.pdf

Very true, thanks for sharing

Absolutely, particularly at the low end. I got my first "modern" mechanical around 2015ish. Tray mount, Micro-USB, exposed switches, steel plate, the worst bluetooth that ever bluetoothed, soldered-in Outemu Blues, gamer backlight caps, and cost me around $50 for a 70% layout, though admittedly with real RGB (through hole diodes, btw). I got some new keycaps because I really just freakin' HAD to, but they were laser-marked OEM profile in "pearl and pebble" except for a single red ESC key, and I think they were a good $20-$25 on their own. Nicer stuff was available from Taiwanese brands or Das Keyboard, but options were still distinctly limited, and only the deepest rabbit-hole dwellers were importing ornate aluminum customs from South Korea.

Now, for $35 you can get a very nice looking gasket-mount hotswap 75% or TKL with a variety of switch choices and perfectly reasonable keycaps, and potentially even open source firmware. Get up to $60 and you can find one that also has a CNC aluminum case. That same $20-25 keycap budget opens a world of very neat keycaps; clones and no names to be sure, but all manner of shapes and colorways, and certainly much higher quality than I managed on my Drevo Calibur v1... which I do still have, LOL. The custom and semi-custom scene is so immense that old-timers wax nostalgic about how it used to be hard to find what you wanted and now there's no "hunt" to the hobby, outside vintage collectors.

Honestly, as desktop computers become more niche for creative and gaming use cases, the people using them will sort of by-definition be at least a bit of an enthusiast of some sort, so peripherals that skew a little to the higher end makes sense, though on the flip side that could eventually get ridiculous if PCs stop being a large market in their own right. We're kind of in a sweet spot right now.

Yeah I agree it's bad from a UX point of view. I think the likely reason is adding an LED in the key itself is more expensive.

Nobody touch types caps lock.

That's probably intended for touch-typists.

Also, I don't touch-type, but the CAPS-Lock LED on the button seems to be always hidden by my hands, making me consider the original positioning to be a good idea.

Of course, before actually using a keyboard with the LED on the key, I used to consider this better.

I'm only had to do this sort of thing with my Model F XTs (my AT works with a standard passive AT->ps/2 adapter->usb adapter). RP2040s weren't even a thing when I was playing with this stuff, but I don't doubt there are some great QoL improvements.

I admit I don't get bothered by it really, but I can certainly understand the preference, and it adds visual interest. The placement is kind of interesting, as Cherry MX switches (and some Alps) are made accommodate an LED threaded through the switch housing. This was specifically for on-key indicator lamps, but it evolved over time to our current situation with per-key LED lighting.

Oh yes. Converting this one was interesting. HERE is what it actually does. the "na" keys still send the original combo codes because the particular conversion firmware I use ran out of room.

I prefer RP2040 stuff when I make a keyboard, but (most) Pro Micros use 5v I/O, while the RP2040 uses 3.3V. XT/AT keyboards also run at 5V. That means it's generally just easier on these conversions to stick with the tried and true, and people have managed to cram VIAL builds onto the memory footprint, which makes it even better.

Aww, that's too bad. It was a total gimmick, but it was actually used by a lot of the (very subpar) games. Later in the TI99/4a life they were selling it super cheap or bundling it with games, which is how we got it. You could even get it to saw words directly from TI BASIC.

The Evo80 looks nice. I was torn between that and the Wobkeys Crush 80 and went with the latter. Both feel super great for the price.

Nope, could not afford that. I didn't even have a casette player to save what I wrote on that machine, at least at the beginning.

I used one of those for a long time because I have two rows of keyboards (I need two distinct workstations for work and a KVM wasn't cutting it) and I was worried about breaking the port on the front keyboard.

Nice, been a while since I saw someone needing a Soarer's converter.

Hey, TI99/4a bro!

That was also my first computer. Did you have the sweet voice synthesizer that sounded kinda like the AI from Wargames?

Like my first keyboard, the TI99/4A had the caps lock LED in the same position. I always found it irritating to look for it elsewhere.

Looking at the keyboard before reading the text I thought "Oh, a keybord from a chemical or biological lab equipment".

And there are a lot more keys not doing anything related to the text on them, I'd say.

Fun project: Just make them send the key's lettering as a string of letters.

Love that capslock led. It always irritates me that the visual feedback for capslock is on the opposite side of the keyboard than the actual capslock.

bleth