As the title implies, I have had an incredibly distracting end to the summer. My actual job has been getting pretty intense recently, plus both my wife and I caught COVID for the first time (she's still reeling from it) and school started for our kids. Thus, while I have had some things going on I've neglected logging anything. 

First, I found out that first keyboard probably isn't bad. After testing all the ones I ordered (like six or seven) they all have those same keys causing problems. Second, I realized the little gold plated pins in these Hirose connectors are ultra fragile, and I think the heat from my soldering iron melted the plastic housing a bit, which in turn pulled some pins out of alignment or bent them or whatever. Thus, I need to rethink my soldering station, and I'll have to likely replace my PEX plumbing heat gun for a real hot air rework station. Another issue is that my v1 board layout is terrible in practice: the pins get in the way of the connector! Also, I easily have the space to provide at least some dedicated voltage regulation on the board, which would make wiring the thing up to a microcontroller much easier.

Speaking of the keyboard MCU, I decided to buy an Adafruit ItsyBitsy ATmega32U4 3.3 V 8 MHz board to streamline the process. The board was dirt cheap and has all the other stuff the ATmega needs around it, and what do I care if I solder all that shit onto a board myself for a prototype? I believe I can construct a small adapter board that would have the IB soldered to the back, while the front would contain the Hirose connector and some power regulator devices. The USB port of the MCU is what I was intending to use as a test connection, and here it is all in one little package! 

Before I design and order a new board to do this, I need to get the chip installed with qmk firmware or some other equivalent (oh god please I don't want to homebrew a keyboard driver) with a simple test circuit to test the firmware. If I can get the Q20 to spit out a letter I think I'll be confident enough to go ahead with round two of board ordering.

Action Items:
0) buy a microUSB to USB-A cable that carries data (most difficult step)
1) get Q20 firmware from somewhere and figure out how to install it
2) wire up 2-3 COL pins and 2-3 ROW pins into the IB, plug into a computer, and type some letters