Beat me to it. It's also just F8

For my own improvement, what else would you have liked to see explained?

I have to agree. The level of detail esp. related to the schematic design is either not slow enough or too detailed to make it approachable for most viewers. I understand that you warned that the viewers should have basic understanding of electronics but it seems to me a deeper knowledge about circuit design is necessary here. Now, how could this be improved? Most keyboard enthusiasts that are brave enough to step beyond just buying a kit and assemble it, I believe still do not have enough knowledge about circuit design. However there are some tools that can help, but explanation is still limited. This is I think where you can fill the gap. For schematics, there is ergogen, and for components there are premade boards (eg. pro micro). Even with those things, I found that there is limited information to eg. to which pin should I connect the rows, columns, indicator leds, oled screen. Then how to assemble them (eg. how to make the IC board hot swappable, not just the key switch). Then after the components are all assembled in the pcb or handwired, what to do? How do we flash the qmk thing? etc I do really appreciate this video series though, I think you put a lot of effort there. 👍🏼

​@leonardab5042 totally second this. for me, the video is more supplementary to the knowledge I already know.

@@CasualCodersOfficial I watched the video in expectation to see more about the micro-controller part as I lack knowledge around Atmega as HID. Making a PCB as you showed required quite some level of skills I would say - I can do it but I would not recommend this to anyone with only basic levels. Using Kicad and working with SMT parts looks too easy and beginners might tricked into buying a lot of stuff but ending up with an unfinished project. Many of us know how easy it is to screw up a footprint of a part and end up with a work around (in best case). Either the video should be long multi-part series with many hours of beginners friendly explanation of how to design PCB's and pick electronic parts (I think you don't aim for this) or the video should assume you already got these skills and express this assumption to the viewer. I hope you do not stop making content and really hope for part 3+ to see how the projects continues and if the boards gets a case?

@@posi_de Everything above is super helpful. Regarding HID, I never touched that, as it's all software side and handled by the QMK Devs. I do believe I touched on the fact that this isn't something I'd recommend to a beginner in part 1: kzfaq.info/get/bejne/f7CoqN2qtJ_GaIE.html Though that was more than a year ago now.When I initially started this, I wasn't expecting it to take as long as it did. This video series definitely falls into the category pointed out by @violetbob694 where it's more supplementary and hopefully useful to provide a direction to refine further searches. I don't have the time nor the ability to create the needed 10 hour course to adequately explain every single aspect of board layout and design. I can try to add some further references to the description if that'd be beneficial though.

Glad I could help clarify some things!

I hope so too!

Thanks! Glad you enjoyed it!

When I made my keyboard (128 keys), I solved this issue with the AT90USB1286. It's the biggest AVR MCU Atmel makes. It's got 48 GPIOs and runs at 5v. Alternatively, you could make use of one of the high pin count STM32s like the F103Rx, F103Vx, or F103Zx microcontrollers. Note that these are 3v3 logic and not 5v. Here are the design files for my keyboard. github.com/CasualCodersProjects/Keyboard

@@CasualCodersOfficial ah awesome! So you threw enough IO at the problem to fix it? I'll definitely check out those chips and files. That'll be a great help, thank you

​@@buzz1ebee Is the 48 GPIOs of that IC not enough? You might also be able to do something with shift registers, but I fear that may cause significant latency on any keys downstream of it. I was going to ask about the ESP32-S3/S2, but those are only 45 GPIO at most. That said, I'm not 100% certain which of the NRF SoC's you intended to use. I expect the chip with 48 IOs is the BGA one.

Digikey's got a nice tutorial that I used when I was first getting started. It is a bit dated now, but it's all generally still aplicable. kzfaq.info/get/bejne/rMdzictjuKe-iWg.html

I know I already said this, but dark reader.

That would be really cool, but I'm afraid it's rather impractical. I lack the design skills to make the body, and the suppliers for mouse sensors have a minimum order quantity of like 10,000.

It's my favorite!

Use a dark theme for the schematic editor. You can find them in the plugin manager.

I've never used eagle, but Eagle is now an autodesk product and costs $680 per year. I won't be using it. In addition, Kicad added some small auto-complete features in release version 7.0.0: www.kicad.org/blog/2023/02/Version-7.0.0-Released

I'd argue that an auto router would give worse results than routing by hand. Especially without loads of routing rules that could take a day or two to do.