Lucie / minutecurrently trying to finish a new version of the MNT Reform Keyboard for the Reform Next (but will be backwards compatible). it has an RP2040 MCU and RGB backlight (individual for each key). still needs a bunch of routing.
Pete Johanson@mntmn (asking the following not to question your choices, but better understand the motivation) what makes you pick RP2040 over something dead simple like stm32f072? Availability? Price? More "hackable" nature of rp2040?
@petejohanson i migrated to rp2040 during the chip crisis from atmega32u4/2 and kinda stuck with it.
@mntmn makes sense. Tons of keyboard makers did the same thing.
gadgetoid@petejohanson @mntmn am I missing some glorious third party promised land for STM bringup because their HAL and software stack (CubeMX 😫) is insufferable 🤣
I guess with keyboards there are plenty of ports for existing firmwares/RTOS?
IMHO MicroPython on RP2040 makes a really great baseline from which to hack together a keyboard- with even the HID descriptors written in Python it was hella fast to iterate.
@gadgetoid @mntmn most of their variants are well supported by @zephyr and by @zmk by extension. QMK uses chibios for their stm32 support, but I've not used it personally. But I've got a few stm32 keyboards/macro pads here that happily do their thing.
And for sure, if using CP, RP2040 is a no brainer.