A macropad made to make copy/paste easier
Yes! There's no reason you have to use this exclusively for copy/pasting, or other common shortcuts. You can do whatever you want with it, really. I was comissioned to design this by a friend who does a lot of copy/pasting at work. As he would like to save himself from a perpetually sore wrist, it was designed to the specifications he provided, right down to the specific intended use case. Since it's meant to be used for copying and pasting in an office-like environment, "Clipboard" just so happened to be a good play on words. (Shoutouts to clue for pointing that out!)
Short answer: Because I already have the parts lol
Long answer: To keep costs down, the deisgn was made to use parts we (myself and the friend who commissioned this board) already own. We both have a spare Tiny2040, I have hundreds of 1N4148 diodes from making keyboards, and I also have tons of leftover Kailh sockets and SK6812MINI-Es from the initial run of the PicoLX.
The RP2040 Zero is significantly cheaper and has a near-identical pinout. Some pins remain unused but you can solder straight to the pins if you want to add any extra peripherals.
| Part | Package | Qty |
|---|---|---|
| 100nF Capacitor | 0805 | 3 |
| 1N4148 Diode | DO-35 | 4 |
| SK6812MINI-E | MINI-E | 3 |
| Keyboard Switch | MX-style | 3 |
| Rotary Encoder | PEC12R-4215F-S0024 | 1 |
| Pimoroni Tiny2040 | N/A | 1 |
| SN74LV1T34DBV | SOT-23-5 | 1 |
This board was developed using KMK Firmware. Instructions for setting up KMK on your board can be found in the Getting Started docs.
After KMK itself is set up, delete the existing code.py or main.py on the CIRCUITPY drive, and copy the code.py file in this repository's "keymap" directory to the root of the drive.
You're done!
- By default, it does a lot. Maybe too much. Probably too much, actually. Please feel free to edit it down for your own use case! The KMK docs are your friend.
- The OLED code used here is currently undocumented. It's fully reworked from example code I found on a GitHub issue thread that I can't seem to find again. It should be straightforward enough to understand, though!
CircuitPython libraries can be found here.
This project will require the following libraries from the "lib" folder of the library bundle:
- neopixel.mpy
- adafruit_displayio_ssd1306.mpy (required for OLED)
- adafruit_display_text (required for OLED)
Copy these files and folders into the "lib" folder on your CIRCUITPY drive.
Clipboard is made with an I2C 128x64 SSD1306 OLED display in mind. If you have a different display with a different resolution, you will have to edit code.py accordingly. The underside of the board has the appropriate pins marked, with SDA on GP26 and SCL on GP27. The VCC (or VDD (or 3.3V)) pin on the OLED should be wired to the +3V3 pin on the Clipboard.
- Tiny2040 Symbol & Footprint by chinatsu - Licensed under Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported. License can be found in
rp2040directory. The following changes were made to the pcbnew footprint for this project:- "U1" and "Tiny2040" text on silkscreen layer have been moved
- Rectangular pads were added to the front copper layer to allow for surface mounting
- Silkscreen outline was changed so as to not overlap with the rectangular pads
- marbastlib by ebastler - Licensed under the CERN Open Hardware Licence Version 2 - Permissive.
- MX_V2 and MX_Alps_Hybrid by ai03 - Both licensed under the MIT License.