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Comment by colemannugent | Hacker News Reader

I wonder if these would be a good fit for the DIY mechanical keyboard scene. With a board like this it looks like all you'd need electronics-wise is a battery and a charge controller.

I wouldn't think it would be too difficult to get QMK running on these.

It doesn't look like these are close to the Pro Micro pinout though, so perhaps a shim PCB to wire things up correctly?

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There's 6 extra pins over the promicro which is a footprint a lot of boards target.

https://beta.docs.qmk.fm/developing-qmk/c-development/compat... list of things QMK supports.

There are a few bluetooth keyboard controllers that already fit the bluetooth controller niche and are pin compatible (nice!nano). This having a microusb port would make it less appealing as well.

Personally I'm more interested in the RP2040 Pro Micro variant. It uses KMK, works with circuit python and can have its keymap changed by editing a file on it rather than reflashing or being limited by Via/Vial.

Only one of the newer ESP32 variants has USB HID support, so none of them are compatible (except for Bluetooth, but battery life there won't be good). There was someone who was porting QMK (or maybe ZMK) to ESP32, so hopefully that'll happen.

From a hardware perspective, likely. The regular esp8266/esp32 chips are arduino-compatible. If I remember correctly a common chip for DIY keyboards are the Arduino Micros.

I'd say they are bad because they aren't very power efficient. There are boards with nrf52 chips that already have qmk support iirc.

I would assume that for a keyboard you'd want something with much lower power consumption.

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