---
title: "Chocolate Keyboard"
author: "shaan"
description: "A 95% keyboard with 16 rotary encoders"
created_at: "2025-06-20"
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Time spent: 10 hours(?)

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This keyboard was made as a workshop to teach a few people the basics of PCB design and introduce them to both Hack Club and Highway.

I chose the name Chocolate as a joke based upon one of my friends keyboards, Cacao.

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Let's go!

June 20th, 2025

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I was a little stuck for ideas, and I remembered that I scrapped my old keyboard from hackpad because I was very new to PCB design and I didn't think I did it well, so I thought it would be a good idea to do it again.

Today I did the entire schematic for the keyboard. It was a lot easier than I had originally imagined because I now had decent experience in PCB design. I decided to challenge myself by trying to add as many Rotary Encoders as I could fit (while staying slightly reasonable), so I chose to add 16 rotary encoders in a row at the top of my keyboard.

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June 21st, 2025

I mentioned hack club and highway to undercity to a few of my friends, and they were very interested, so I decided to finish this project up through a workshop and teach them the basics of PCB designs so they could work on their own projects.

June 23, 2025

I decided to spend the day finishing my PCB routing. I originally decided to place my IO expander with all of my rotary encoders in the top left of the PCB, which was a big mistake. I ended up spending several hours trying to fully route it, but realized it was definitely not efficient.

I ended up moving the GPIO expander to the middle top, although not fully space efficient, I decided that if I wanted to go through with having 16 rotary encoders, it would be the most practical approach.

I also decided to add a signature and a cool looking image I found online as silkscreen art for fun since I had never tried silkscreen art before.

June 24th 2025

I leave for New York City tomorrow, so I figured that I might as well go ahead and finish this up.

I spent the majority of the time today packing, running that workshop and teaching my friends, and CADing.

I decided to add a little window where you could see the Raspberry Pi for fun, and I thought it would look cool.

All in all, I spent the most time helping my friends diagnose issues and teaching them how to use Kicad, but I think their projects and keyboards will turn out much cooler than mine! They plan to put a lot more time into their designs, and I think I gave them a great starting point.

June 25th, 2025

I am leaving for my flight in 2 hours, so I decided to spend this time wrapping up my BOM, journal, and shipping my project :)