Hey everyone, this is my first PCB design ever and I'm building an 8 key macropad with a rotary encoder as a birthday gift for a friend. I've never used KiCad before this project.

What I'm using:

Microcontroller: Seeed XIAO RP2040 8x MX mechanical switches, direct solder, no hot swap sockets 1x rotary encoder module with CLK, DT, SW, plus and GND pins Firmware will be QMK with VIA support

Since I have 8 switches and the RP2040 has enough spare GPIO pins, I wired every switch straight to its own dedicated pin instead of building a row and column matrix, so there are no diodes anywhere on the board. All the switch grounds share one common ground bus back to the MCU. The encoder is wired the same way, three of its pins go to three more dedicated GPIOs, plus goes to 3V3, and GND joins the same shared ground point the switches use.

Attached is the schematic. Since this is my first time doing anything like this, I'd really appreciate if someone could sanity check it before I move on to laying out the actual PCB and ordering it. Is the direct pin wiring approach actually fine here, or am I missing something that would normally need a diode or a pull up resistor I'm not accounting for? Any feedback is welcome, trying to avoid an expensive mistake on my first board.

Thanks in advance.

Hi everyone!

I'm planning my first ever hardware project and would really appreciate some advice before I start ordering parts and designing the PCB.

The goal is to build a custom macropad as a birthday gift for a friend who spends most of her day working in Excel. I have a software background and also have basics of cad down, but I've never designed a PCB or soldered anything before, so I'm trying to keep the project challenging but realistic.

Current plan

• MCU: Seeed XIAO RP2040 (USB-C)
• Firmware: QMK + VIA
• Keys: 8 MX mechanical switches
• Slider: 1 linear slide potentiometer (likely a 60mm B10K)
• PCB: Custom designed in KiCad
• Case: 3D printed
• Connection: USB-C through the XIAO

I'm planning to solder the switches directly to the PCB rather than using Kailh hot-swap sockets unless there's a strong reason not to.

Why QMK + VIA?

The recipient works in a corporate environment (Excel-heavy workflow). They can access usevia.app from their office network, so the idea is that they can remap keys using VIA without installing any software, and the configuration stays stored on the macropad itself.

The slider is something I'm still figuring out. I'm considering using it for:

• Excel scrolling
• Horizontal scrolling
• Zoom
• Volume

I'm open to suggestions on what would actually be useful.

A few questions

1. Is the Seeed XIAO RP2040 a good choice for a first QMK/VIA project, or would you recommend something else?
2. Is there any reason I should choose hot-swap sockets over direct-solder for a 7-key gift build?
3. Are there any common first-time PCB design mistakes I should watch out for?
4. For the slider, is a 60mm B10K linear potentiometer the most common choice, or is there a better option?
5. Is there anything I'm forgetting in my BOM?
6. If you were building this as a gift, what would you change or improve?

Any advice, criticism, or "I wish I knew this before building my first keyboard" stories would be greatly appreciated!

Thanks!

Absolutely gorgeous…
From my one day of use the treble is a bit more sharp then my liking fixed it with eq but the eartip feel a but irritating like even when no song is playing and the iem isn’t connected it gave me minor headaches did others also face the same issue? What was your solution
Apart from that they are so good while gaming the accuracy of the sound is amazing sound stage is fabulous for what i paid absolutely worth it