It took me some time to get started with the right side, since I had to make a couple of design decisions.

As a small spoiler, I posted a rendering on twitter (see below)

Maybe you already spotted a couple of things, but here is the complete list:

•  Kailh hotswap sockets instead of Mill Max sockets (since these are a pain to solder).
• Putting the RP2040 directly on the PCB instead of using the RP2040 Pico board to 1) allow a USB-C socket, 2) access even more IO pins and 3) use a bigger flash chip as I'm not sure that the Pico's 2MB is enough in the end (paranoid?).
• USB-C for the split-link, which I decided after running a poll on Twitter and Mastodon and USB-C was the clear winner on both platforms.
• A more generic footprint for the rotary encoder which allows the a standard Alps encoder, the rotary encoder from the left side EVQWGD001, the Pimoroni Trackball and there is a also a cirque connector (for I2C)
• A non-inverting buffer for each display row on the SPI clock and data line to hopefully overcome the problem (maybe a fan-out issue of the RP2040's IO pins) I described earlier where I saw some kind of noise when updating the displays.
• Status OLED display directly connected to a socket instead of a I2C break-out board from a random Chinese manufacturer.
• I also picked smaller FPC sockets for the displays - only 14 pins - since this is the goal for the kit. And 14 pins only need an FPC of about 7.5mm which will work for much more key switches than before (which was about 8.5mm).
• Plenty of solder jumpers, which allow a lot of different operation modes. For example: I got some newer 0.42" OLED displays for testing, which allow a voltage supply of 3.3V and therefore, I could bypass the 3.8V regulator which was required for the old OLED displays.

So a lot of new stuff and I really hope (fingers crossed) it is not too much at once and the board boots up!

That's it for today. Let me know what you think about these improvements, it's not too late to change some things before assembly!

And of course I which a joyful holiday season whatever you celebrate at your home!!