couscous delivery!

2022-10-17

couscous pcb seeed

Got my board from Seeed Fusion today! Very excited to get started.

So, what is this? Well, Seeed Fusion had a competition. “Design a mechanical keyboard using ou Seeed XIAO mcu as the brains and we produce it for free, with all components.” That’s a radical way to market yourself. So I did what any DIYer would do. I learnt KiCAD and designed a board.

And now my boards have arrived! I can finally start working on them to get them operational.

An unfortunate part on my end is that I took to long to actually send in my design so some components are missing from my boards. I designed an analogue backlight circuit using 5v and GND. You control the RGBA channels using potentiometers and each channel has a SPST switch so you can turn that colour on or off. But Seeed Fusion didn’t have neither the pots or the LEDs I needed at their place so they would have to order from overseas. And since I was late in my entry they wouldn’t get their parts before the competition ended. So I removed those from the BOM and thought that I could perhaps fix those myself.
Well, now that I have the boards that might not be so easy. The pots sure, those are just standard THT parts. Easypeasy. The LEDs though … SMD things are small and might be quite hard to get right.

I will wait a bit on ordering the parts I need for backlight and just try to get the board up and running. My plan is to code the thing in Rust. I picked the XIAO rp2040 with this in mind. The rp2040 seems to have good support in Rust, and there is even a HAL just for the XIAO. Sweet!

Oh, and holy smokes those LEDs on the XIAO are bright. I thought I would be able to have the mcu on full display but if I can’t turn the brightness of those LEDs down I will have to be covered up.

Some pics of the board

Some mistakes on the boards. Each of them has a switch leg that is not soldered. And the diodes could have been done neater. But aside from those I have no complaints!