A Great Introduction to Macropads
Macropads have been all the rage for quite a while now. However, many people still haven’t discovered how awesome having a macropad can be! This Pico-based DIY Macropad Kit is inexpensive and easy to build. With a variety of macropad firmwares available for the Pico, you’ll have your choice of how to customize it.
While it doesn’t use mechanical keyboard keys like many macropads do, why spend the money if you’re not sure you’re going to find it useful? 6 keys is a good number to start with, enough to map your most commonly used keyboard shortcuts or macros and still quickly memorize which is which. If you discover that 6 buttons isn’t enough, you can always hack more buttons on, or move up to a bigger, meaner macropad with tons of RGB LEDs and the clickiest keys ever!
Even this starter kit has a few nice touches, like the LEDs underneath to give a glow surrounding the macropad. It even has a button for turning them on and off! The example code uses CircuitPython, but you could easily flash QMK or another popular macropad firmware if you want to really up your customization without writing a bunch of code.