Illustrated Kristina with an IBM Model M keyboard floating between her hands.

Keebin’ With Kristina: The One With The SEGA Pico Keyboard

February 10, 2025 by Kristina Panos 4 Comments

It’s been a minute since I featured a tiny keyboard, and that’s okay. But if you want to get your feet wet in the DIY keyboarding community, making a little macro pad like [Arnov Sharma]’s Paste Pal is a great place to start.

A macro pad with five switches and a small OLED display. — Image by [Arnov Sharma] via Hackaday.IO

This is a follow-up to his original Paste Pal, which only had two buttons for copy and paste plus an OLED display. This updated version does three more things thanks to a total of five blue (!) switches. The selected command shows up on the screen so you know what you’ve done.

Right now, [Arnov] has the Paste Pal set up to do Copy, Paste, Enter, Scroll Up, and Scroll Down, but changing the assignments is as easy as updating a few lines of code.

Paste Pal Mk. II is at heart a Seeed Xiao SAMD21, which in this case is programmed in Arduino. If you want to make things easier on yourself, you could program it in CircuitPython instead, although [Arnov] includes the Arduino code in his excellent build guide.

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A Japanese-input macro pad with a display and color-coded light-up keys.

Introducing The KanaChord Plus Keyboard カナコード・プラス・キーボード

October 5, 2024 by Kristina Panos 2 Comments

We love to watch your projects grow as much as you do. Really, we’re like proud grandparents around here. So it’s great to see that [Mac Cody] is back with the KanaChord Plus Keyboard, which supports an astounding 6,165 Kanji as well as 6,240 of the most common Japanese words that contain Kanji. This is all in addition to supporting the Kana characters, which make up the rest of Japanese writing (more on that in a minute).

If you need to input Japanese, this is a dream come true. If you’re trying to learn Japanese in the first place, this could be exactly what you need to become fluent.

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Keebin’ With Kristina: The One With The Folding Typewriter

August 26, 2024 by Kristina Panos 7 Comments

Have you built yourself a macro pad yet? They’re all sorts of programmable fun, whether you game, stream, or just plain work, and there are tons of ideas out there.

A DIY macro pad with key switches, dual linear pots, a rotary encoder, a screen, and a speaker. — Image by [CiferTech] via Hackaday.IO

But if you don’t want to re-invent the wheel, [CiferTech]’s MicroClick (or MacroClick — the jury is still out) might be just what you need to get started straight down the keyboard rabbit hole.

This baby runs on an ATmega32U4, which known for its Human Interface Device (HID) capabilities. [CiferTech] went with my own personal favorite, blue switches, but of course, the choice is yours.

There are not one but two linear potentiometers for volume, and these are integrated with WS2812 LEDs to show where you are, loudness-wise. For everything else, there’s an SSD1306 OLED display.

But that’s not all — there’s a secondary microcontroller, an ESP8266-07 module that in the current build serves as a packet monitor. There’s also a rotary encoder for navigating menus and such. Make it yours, and show us!

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A single-key macro pad with a screen built into the button.

2024 Tiny Games Contest: Are You A Good Judge Of Time?

August 11, 2024 by Kristina Panos 7 Comments

What can you do with a one-button keyboard? Quite a bit, actually, especially if that key has a little screen on it. That’s the idea behind [Maker M0]’s MagicClick macro pad, which is an updated version of a highly useful project we have featured in the past. Well, now there’s a tiny game to go with it.

Think you’re pretty good at measuring the passage of time? This game will likely prove you wrong. Press and hold the button and the timer begins with some pre-determined interval, such as four seconds. Once you think those four seconds have passed, release the button and find out how far off you were.

While the first version of this keyboard used the CH582F RISC-V microcontroller, the second and this third version use an ESP32-S3 on a custom, tightly packed PCB. That TFT display measures 0.85″, and the battery is an 3.7 V 802025 Li-Po. [Maker M0] has also redesigned this to make it easier to print, and plans to support circular screens in the near future.

Keebin’ With Kristina: The One With The 24-Hour Macro Pad

July 15, 2024 by Kristina Panos 2 Comments

They say Rome wasn’t built in a day, but this great little music-controlling macro pad by [nibbler] actually was. Why? Because as Hackaday’s own [Donald Papp] reminded us, we all need a win sometimes, especially as projects drag on and on without any end in sight.

A small macro pad with six buttons. — Image by [nibbler] via Toxic Antidote

As [nibbler] points out, what really constitutes a win? Set the bar too low and it won’t feel like one at all. Too high, and you may become too discouraged to cross the finish line. With that in mind, [nibbler] set the bar differently, limiting themselves to what could be done in the one day per week they have to devote time to electronic matters.

One-day turnaround usually means using parts on hand and limiting oneself to already-learned skills and techniques. No problem for [nibbler], who, armed with an Arduino Leonardo Tiny and a some colorful push buttons, set about designing a suitable enclosure, and then putting it all together. Was this a win? [nibbler] says yes, and so do I.

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Most of a three-key macro pad featuring a 3D-printed, LEGO-compatible plate.

3D-Printed Macro Pad Plate Is LEGO-Compatible

April 30, 2024 by Kristina Panos 2 Comments

We love LEGO, we love keyboards, and when the two join forces, we’re usually looking at a versatile peripheral that’s practically indestructible. Such seems to be the case with [joshmarinacci]’s LEGO-compatible 3D-printed plate for a three-key macro pad. For a first foray into scratch-built keyboard construction, we think this is pretty great.

The idea here is threefold: the plate holds the switches in place, negates the need for a PCB, and makes it possible to build the case completely out of LEGO. In fact, [joshmarinacci]’s plan for the keycaps even includes LEGO — they are going to 3D print little adapters that fit the key switch’s stem on one side, and the underside of a 2×2 plate on the other.

Although [joshmarinacci]’s plan is to design a PCB for the next version, there is plenty to be said for combining the plate and the PCB by printing guides for the wires, which we’ve seen before. We’ve also seen LEGO used to create a keyboard stand that fits just right.

Via KBD

KanaChord Is A Macro Pad For Japanese Input

April 8, 2024 by Kristina Panos 13 Comments

There are various situations that warrant additional keyboards on your desk, and inputting a second language is definitely a good one. That’s the idea behind KanaChord, which generates Unicode macros to render Japanese Kana characters using chords — pressing multiple keys at once as you would on a piano.

The Japanese writing system is made up of Kanji (Chinese characters), Hirigana, and Katakana. Without going into it too much, just know that Hirigana and Katakana are collectively known as the Kana, and there’s a table that lays out the pairing of vowels and consonants. To [Mac Cody], the layout of the Kana table inspired this chording keyboard.

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