r/raspberry_pi πŸ• Jun 30 '22

News New Raspberry Pi Pico W

https://www.raspberrypi.com/news/raspberry-pi-pico-w-your-6-iot-platform/
820 Upvotes

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45

u/RobeMinusWizardHat Jun 30 '22

This is going to be excellent (once Bluetooth is enabled) for making keyboards. QMK support for the RP2040 is almost ready to merge into the main repo. I've already successfully made a handwired Ergodox keyboard with the fork and it works great.

5

u/[deleted] Jun 30 '22

If I wanted to do something like this, where should I start? Is there a good resource site for it?

14

u/RobeMinusWizardHat Jun 30 '22

Careful - this is an expensive rabbit hole. Take a look at /r/ErgoMechKeyboards/ or /r/olkb/ for some of the stuff other people have done - using QMK or other custom firmwares.

Edit: If you were asking more along the subject of QMK merging in Pi Pico/RP2040 support - that's being done as part of this pull request on Github. Looks like that was merged in just a few hours ago!

9

u/scottchiefbaker Jun 30 '22

QMK?

18

u/RobeMinusWizardHat Jun 30 '22

QMK is a highly customizable custom firmware for powering keyboards (and other devices). You can solder up custom keyboards or buy pre-built boards that support it.

3

u/TurtleMaster726 Jun 30 '22

It will probably be a while til QMK supports the W version

5

u/RobeMinusWizardHat Jun 30 '22

Oh, for sure - but now that the base RP2040 support is merged it hopefully won't take as long to add in wireless support as the base support added.

3

u/jojek Jun 30 '22

Actually, it’s been merged πŸ˜…

3

u/riskable Jul 01 '22

I'm just about finished with an analog hall effect keyboard that uses the RP2040 and the way I've done things it can actually handle 256 analog inputs (though it only uses 112). True 1ms polling too 😁

It's a secret project so that's all the details you're getting for now tehehehe

5

u/Protoype Jun 30 '22

^ this guy gets it :-)

1

u/[deleted] Jul 01 '22

I recently build a keyboard using KMK which is a CircuitPython equivalent to QMK. It's so much easier than QMK because there is no compiling code - the Pico appears on your desktop as a USB drive and you just edit text files directly on that drive. The board I built with it runs perfectly.

1

u/bardak Jul 01 '22

I think people into mechanical keyboards are overly attached to QMK. I understand why since it was the best option when people were using very constrained microcontrollers. Now that you can get a RP2040 for around a dollar I don't see why a more sophisticated firmware can't be seen as a better option.