PCBs Have Arrived

They look good, well, as good as they were supposed to look given my design. I soldered the components on and have started programming. I could've started coding before, but I find that I'm less motivated to code when I can't test out the code.

Early Coding Problems

So it turns out you can't both print to the Serial monitor and use a Pro Micro as a USB device at the same time, or I'm just too ignorant to figure out why my Serial.print commands are being ignored. When I started to code keyboard scanning (pulling each row high, then reading each row to see which buttons are pressed), I realized that my schematic didn't really match my board layout, so I initially labelled my row and column pins incorrectly.

Without the Serial monitor, I'm basically printing stuff using the Keyboard library and a text editor. This works ok, except I have to have the Pro Micro plugged into the computer to load new code, but it's spitting out debugging info whenever it's plugged in. The way I found around this was using keyboard shortcuts to upload new code (ctrl-u on Windows), and have the cursor on a line that's commented out so it doesn't mess up the code during compilation.

On the next version of the hardware I'll just include a switch that disables the keyboard output, like a normal person.

I'm getting a little unexpected ghosting (given that I'm using a diode for each switch), which I haven't really figured out yet. I noticed that @David Boucher used a 1 microsecond delay between pulling each row HIGH and reading the column pins in his keyboard build, so that's what I'll try next. I noticed that his keyboard is hooked up in the opposite direction of mine, but I haven't dug down deep enough to understand that choice yet.