Building

Total: 4 Hrs

08/01/25: 2.5 Hour, Got all my parts and began soldering parts onto the pcb. Some parts were a struggle like the neopixel. Once I got everything but the key switches, I put the switches through the plate and soldered them to the PCB. Put the whole thing into the case next. This is where I realized I haven't learnt anything about tolerences. Had to use my soldering irom to melt plastic around the Xiao RP2040 to get it to fit and be accessible.

07/12/26: 1.5 Hour, Finally came back to finish the Hackpad by finialzing firmware. I had tried in the past but I was out of the country with the hackpad and so I was struggling to figure it out. It was put off until now where I managed to sit down and work through it. Configured the keys to previos, play/pause, next, and forward.backwards navigation. Rotary encoder is used to change volume and the OLED Display shows a legend of Key actions.

Design

Total: 25 Hrs

06/04/25: 1 Hour, Decided I want to do a hackpad, a hackpad that lets me use spotify without opening the player (i dont really need macros for anything else, drew out my idea and studied hackpad guide and made my repository. Was also in the highway call and talked with other hackclubbers about their idea.

06/08/25: 2 hours, Opened kicad project, downloading the OPL SEED library and started my schematic. Put in the symbols of my components except OLED. Spent much time figuring out how to add oled symbol.

06/11/25: 6 hours, I was in a call with friends also working on their highway projects. Wired up all my schematic. I learned to make a symbol for my OLED, and gave them all footprints. I wired it up in my PCB editor, adding text aswell, completing the PCB portion. Downloaded fusion360 to start my sketch for my case.

06/24/25: 4 hours, I added an image to the silkscreen, as well as grab the 3D models of all my components for the pcb.

06/27/25: 5 hours, I created my sketches and model for my case, as well as import a step file of my pcb to see how it fits and started sketching my top piece.

06/27/25: 7 hours, I finished the top piece, tweaking it to fit the pcb, putting them all together. Exported all the neccesary files and made KMK main.py for firmware. Finished!