May 26th: Finished the circuit schematics and the PCB layout!

I decided to do the starter project as I felt that it would help me with shortcuts as I am often times slow when it comes to navigating around on my computer and also to learn and build a PCB. I started with the cuircuit schematics on Kicad. This was my first time creating a PCB so I kinda felt lost on where to start, So My cousin helped guide me through this proccess. For my macropad, I wanted it to be simple and still have a good amount of controles. So I settled on 4 mx switches, 1 slider (PTL30-15R1-104B2 - Potentiometer), a Rotary Encoder, an oled .96" display and at the core a Xaio 2040. I did orgiginally wanted 5 buttons but did not have enough pins so I settled on the 4 button design instead. After I did add a Rotary incoder that had a button in it so it did make up for the loss.

Most of the time spent was on the schematics because it took me a while to find a propper slider online to import in and also due to trying to wire a clean schematic. After finishing the schematic I moved to the PCB lay out. I wanted a comfortable feel to it so I designed one that I thought would feel the best in my setup. I might change the lay out later though if I think a new layout might look better. I put the oled screen in the middle. I do want the oled screen to be an an angle so it is easier to view at but I am not yet sure How I would tilte the screen on the pcb!

That was basically the things I worked on today, found the parts I wanted a designed a pcb that was the best. Tomorrow I want to work on the 3d modle of the macropad case!

[Time spent this session: 3hrs]

May 27 & 28: Started on the macropad case!

On the 27th I started to work on my macropad case in Onshape. I had never cadded in my life and this was a huge challange for me! I spent most of this day looking at tutorials trying to learn how to create scketches, extrutions, holes and other stuff. I was still pretty skeptical on wether I could do the cad but I started anyways by taking measurments of my PCB. I planned to import the 3d PCB modle from Kicad into Onshape, so I could build around it to create the case. However, that did not turn out to work as the .step file did not like being imported into Onshape!!! When I tried to import the modle in it would NOT load. I tried countless number of times importing! I kept downloading the .step file form kicad to import into onshape but the file did not want to be loaded in for some reason. On my last attempt I decided to just wait for it to load in. Maybe I was just impatent and didnt give it enough time.

While I was waiting for the that, I decided to create the connection lines on the pcb modle. My cousin pointed out that I was missing this. I didnt know I had to do that when making the pcb as I was still very knew to this. After finishing the connections I went back to Onshape. It finall loaded in. But not for long beucae by computer could not handle the complexity of the pcb and just beucase very slow and unworkable. So I just scratched that idea and decied to just take the measurements from kicad instead.

[Time spent this session: 4hrs]

On the 28th I finally started to make progress on the cad after a whole day of learning and technical difficulties. Today I started by taking in the measuments form Kicad. The PCB is roughly 77mm x 77mm. I took these dementions and added an extra 5.8mm for the complete base demention. The base turned out to be 88.9mm x 88.9mm. After extruding it I took out the portion for the pcb and added screw holes in the corners with a diameter of 3.2mm. I didnt yet settle on an exact hight for the pcb beucase I could not get the 3d modle to be imported in. After that I started on the top plate. I use ai03 to create the plate. This plate part took a while as I was still struggling to do somethings. When building the top plate, I kept running into problem where I was not able to change the distance between the button and the edge of the plate. I manged to get it at the end by just using the transform tool rather then trying to change the demention between two diffrent sketches. I still need to add a couple for holes for the rodary incoder, slider and the oled screen. During this whole cadding prossess I also created the dementions on a piece of papper for me to better visualize the macropad.

[Time spent this session: 4hrs]