After weeks of work I f

Well piss, here I thought I would be clever and write an intro ON the working keyboard, but it seems I must've torn a connector or something, as a whole collection of letters I mapped just last night are no longer sending signals to the MCU. Oh well, I'm just thrilled that I now have a keymap that I know works and the confidence that I can actually engineer circuits.

Rewind to Friday: I've been on-and-off trying different ways to get QMK firmware onto the IB 32U4 8 MHz 3.3 V board, to no avail. I thought I was getting somewhere using AVRDUDESS, but when I tried to move the window over it crashed and bricked the chip. Arduino IDE cannot write to it anymore, so I may have borked the bootloader. I'll have to investigate repairing it one day, though I doubt it's usefulness as the backpack is soldered on tight. I recently discovered that the lead-free solder I have has a pretty high melting temp, so that backpack board I designed is on there tight.

In any event, I was at a loss as to what to do. I tried to wire up an ATMega34U4 I had on an adapter board, but that didn't seem to get me anywhere. I thought about just calling it quits when I realized that I had four brand new Raspberry Pi Pico 2 boards I had impulse bought when I heard how scarce they were becoming, and I mean $5 a piece is like laughable for this hobby. Anyway, as I read into them, I had somehow missed the fact that you can program them in Python?! Why was I fucking around with C++ this whole time when I could've been coding in a language I already spoke? Gah!

I heated up the soldering iron, cut some lengths of wire, and soldered up this rats nest:

It's ugly and mildly embarassing, but after I installed KMK firmware on it, I was able to make a seven pin column, seven pin row layout, then observe the firmware output as I pressed each key. Voila, a Blackberry Q20 Keyboard that can type until I break it! I still need to figure out the trackpad controls in KMK, mostly if it's possible at my technical skill level. Still, I did it. I made a keyboard, hurray!

I still have another couple parts to test, but then it'll be time to draw up a motherboard that will combine all these disparate pieces of tech into an actual device. Unfortunately, life gets in the way: my wife and I very much want to move, so here sooner than later I'll have to tear down my bench to do wall work, then possibly again to move after said wall work. While it would be cool to have a functional device by the end of the year, I'm in no rush. Besides, a new house means a better workshop most likely!