I wonder how bad an idea it is to mount a raspi pico at a 90-degree angle to a PCB
I'm trying to design a keyboard that needs to fit into a small area (550mm by 15mm) and I realized I can technically get a little more room by making it have two right-angle PCBs. I could do that by designing two PCBs... or I could just have a pico mounted at 90 degrees!
@cinebox I'm not sure I'm gonna have room for that, amusingly enough.
@foone Why would it even be an issue? electrons don't care which direction they are facing.
@Fratm I mean sticking out of the board, like I only solder one side down and the other side is facing away from the board.
I know that'd work electrically, but mechanically it's a tad questionable
@cinebox Nope. Back is used to attach it to a surface, so it's gotta be flat.
@foone can you make it longer? like just for the funny image
@StellaFoxxie I'm trying but so far I've just locked up kicad as it tries to handle even placing the footprints of my 2m keyboard
I just realized this PCB is actually bigger than my chosen PCB fab can make.
I mean, unless I have them make it diagonally, but I imagine that'd be a tad expensive
I locked up kicad for 5 minutes by accidentally trying to insert 8000 keys
@StellaFoxxie suggested I make it EVEN BIGGER and I got up to 254 keys and 1.9m meters before kicad started to completely shit itself
@simonzerafa NO
not only do I not want to do something Tom Scott already did, but keyboards don't do unicode.
@foone @StellaFoxxie "New Github Issue: Not possible to make proper keyboard PCBs with Kicad"
Here it is with an iso-standard height reference, a 5'12" foone
Sigh. I'll stop following you as you seem to have issues with actually having a conversation.
Be well and have a good life.
@foone JLC quoted me a surprisingly reasonable $30 for 5 off 500x15 flex? I don't know about your space constraints but maybe you could origami your micro off one end or side in that case? 500x40 (for a side-hinged one) lands closer to $40
@sif I thought about that, but with how the wiring works that'd get really tricky. I'm just gonna downsize, which should be good enough for my needs
@foone curious why you don’t wire it so the microcontroller module faces up inside the profile of the face
@sif This is wrapping around an edge of a monitor, so it needs to be flat on that side
parts are ordered. who knows when I'll be able to solder it, but you gotta dream.
@gsuberland @dysfun once I can consistently solder again and have money, that might be a great bad idea
@foone what's the difference between "under" and down? Shouldn't "down" be "behind?"
@foone OK, but hear me out... what about a 512*384 Foone?
@buherator from memory it's about 2x faster, but the comparison is difficult.
@gsuberland @foone @dysfun If it's EU-based I would be interested. (For $DAYJOB)
@hennichodernich @foone @dysfun nah it was Chinese
@Extelec what's the basic BOM material cost on that before I wonder about a kit...
@falken I will send you a PCB FOC if you cover postage (I've never made it into a kit. ), other than that you only need a handful of usb connectors, there is a hub built into the base pcb, but I'd suggest using it only to power the pico's due to multiple USB issues on most common OS's.
9 Pi pico's(1's) a display ~£7, a hand full of buttons.
@falken If you are anywhere near Cambridge, I could bring one to the PIJam in the 1st March ?
PCBs & parts arrived! Everything looks good. I'm gonna attempt to solder it together sometime this weekend
Arg I have no solder paste. This is going to be a pain to solder
I finished soldering it together. It's impossible to focus on with my camera (it's tiny and thin!) so here's a blurry photo
Keyboard installed and functional!
It's a macro keyboard for my external monitor.
It's capable of being wireless (but isn't currently) which'll help with cable management, and I need to write some software to make it easier to remap without needing to recompile it.
@foone I realize I'm very late to this, but ... 5' 12"? I'm bothered by this in ways I can't quite explain