May 23, 2025

Started going through lots of videos and threads to find ideas for parts and general ideas of what I might want to do for design. I found some cool keycaps that look like a sunset, and based on the color of RGB blacklighting they can look interesting.

Found and went with what are supposedly one of the best budget linear switches (Gateron Milky Yellow), as well as decided on going for a 100% keyboard even if it may be more challenging because I like my numpad.

Total time spent today: 3hr

May 24, 2025

Started going through tutorials and threads to find a suitable micro controller. I ended up going into a rabbit hole on directly soldering the chip onto the pcb and all the curcuits I would need for that. Althogh I learned a lot about this, I really just lack the experience and tools needed to directly solder a chip onto the PCB, so I decided on using a devboard. I ended up settling on the STM32F411 blackpill because I need an excessive amount of ports to handle a 100% keyboard matrix with RGB.

I looked into the general design of keyboards to get an idea of how I would want to CAD the parts out to be printed in parts, which seems doable but will take some time.

Total time spent today: 6hr

May 25, 2025

I am revisiting what microcontroller to pick because the black pill is very expensive. I found the rp2350 stamp, which is really nice and I might go with instead, it is still a little expensive because of shipping but a lot better than the black pill.

I have sunk a ton of time into the schematic and pcb design, I can tell this is gonna take a ton of revisions.

Only partialy through the first routing but will 100% have to redo it at least a couple times

Total time spent today: 12hr

May 26, 2025

I finished routing all of the adressable LEDs, then had to start rerouting all of them over again (twice) because I used the wrong footprints, which cost me a lot of time. I also researched data resistors for the LED strand which is very interesting and looked into usb c options abd routing.

Total time spent today: 7hr

May 27, 2025

Added USB c, and an encoder, then researched and added a level shifter for my LED data line as well as making smaller changes and finishing routing.

Total time spent today: 4hr

May 27, 2025

Fixed multiple small issues, implemented ground fills and did overall polish

Researching how to implement fuse and ESD protection and starting CAD Total time spent today: 6hr