• PCB Design

    Part of this build involves designing and printing a custom PCB for the keebpad. There are some services from China that allow for cheap printing of custom PCB’s. Generally the charge is ~$5USD for 5 boards and ~$20USD for shipping to Australia. Thanks to the availability of these services, I have opted to produce a PCB for my initial POC instead of building everything onto perfboard first. I do not recommend this, inevitably my first PCB design will have some errors that will need correction and reprinting. This is a risk I am willing to assume to save myself the pain of creating my perfboard POC.

  • Component List

    Various Components that make up this project:

    Hardware

  • ESP32 Development Board

    The ESP32 is the microcontroller at the heart of this project. The ESP32 is a SOC in a SMD package. It comes in a number of variants, namely WROOM and WROVER. The main difference between these chips is that the WROVER integrates an 8mb SPI PSRAM chip on the module. Under both of these chips are a few variations (e.g. ESP32-WROOM-32D vs ESP32-WROOM-32U) which mostly differentiaties between the inclusion of an onboard antenna or a U.FL connector. A somewhat complete list of the various SMD modeules can be found here: ESP32#Surface-mount_module_board. The WROVER is more readily available, cheaper and sufficient for this application, hence this is the chip we will be targetting.