I was a little apprehensive about hand soldering the QFN24 chip for the keyboard, looking at it, the thing was crazy small! I forget how small things are after spending many hours with stuff zoomed a few hundred percent on the computer screen
![](https://i.imgur.com/y5vhVop.png)
(dont look too hard, my keyboard needs cleaning)
so i took the plunge
![](https://i.imgur.com/3bQN9xO.png)
tinned the pads with a small amount of solder, applied a later of flux, clamped the chip with some tweezers and a clothes peg (nothing like having the right tools) and gave it some love with the iron
![](https://i.imgur.com/9kAGsgN.png)
finding the limits of my phone camera, and it looks better in person.
much soldering later and we have filled the pads
![](https://i.imgur.com/16Rt7kt.png)
![](https://i.imgur.com/kQ0bJes.png)
I burnt some code onto the attiny85, grabbed the nearest sd card with ili9341 running, added a battery and pressed the button
![](https://i.imgur.com/aeRzHOe.png)
looking good!!
There are of course issues, my idea of using a clip on programmer is fine for the attiny85, but when the pi covers the chip, you can no longer program it!! need to add a ICSP header. Im also struggling slightly to get my attiny to behave as i want. Getting it to respond over i2c kills my sleep code, think i have some conflicting interrupts...
to be continued......
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exciting!
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nice job!! also agree re hot air gun!
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Yeah, planning on making a little reflow oven for the future
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This is where you get yourself a cheap hot air gun — those chips simply jump into their place.
You probably want to make those LEDs a bit less bright.
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yeah its a little bright, tis using the adafruit neopixel library atm, bridgtness is set to 25 out of a possible 255!! will probably end up covering it a bit
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