After winging about delays last week, I made some leaps and bounds!

As mentioned last week, I impulse purchased an ItsyBitsy 324U 3.3V 8MHz board from Adafruit (here) because part of my problem prototyping anything that needs a bunch of auxillary devices, like oscillators and diodes, suddenly becomes a nightmare to quickly slap together. Thus, with all of that nonsense taken care of, I was able to rapidly type out a short proof of concept Arduino sketch that would behave something akin to a keyboard. I was able to print the letters Q and G to screen on my workbench Linux by connecting a COL output to a ROW input, much in the same way as what would happen with a keyboard, and it worked! I'll at least be able to get something moving on this module.

But how am I gonna get a keyboard attached to this thing, let alone the BBQ20 with its special squirrel adapter? I decided to bite the bullet and design a new adapter board using some of the circuitry from this handheld keboard module as source material. Since I figured it'd take me much longer to figure out the keyboard firmware than this hardware, I decided the smart thing would be to make this adapter board into a board for the ItsyBitsy (hereafter IB) in order to use the existing hardware to make life easy.

I've uploaded the KiCad files for this adapter board, feel free to use them as you see fit.