The cute Pico Macropad eases the transition to the desktop

[Thomas "Mel" Maillioux] is no stranger to custom mechanical keyboard gaming - and with having to return to the office, they decided to whip up a nice little macropad to both commemorate the occasion and return the job. a little easier.

This cotton candy-colored beauty block was designed to pay homage to [Mel]'s favorite joystick, the TRS-80 self-centering number with the unique red square button, and it looks fantastic . He started this journey by studying the key captions on their laptop to figure out which macros might serve them best, based on the most worn captions.

Fortunately, all the macros they wanted to use (lock desktop, save current active file, minimize/restore all windows, align windows right or left, and control volume) are all already macro in Windows, which made things pretty easy.

Hardware wise it doesn't get much easier than a Raspberry Pi Pico, some mechanical switches, an old USB cable and some donor CAT5 pairs to make it look nice inside and out . Plus, the convenient rotary encoder volume button will mute and unmute sound when pressed. We think the snap-on case looks great and doesn't need any brackets to get started. If you want to make your own, be sure to check out the repository.

Okay, we lied: making macro blocks just got easier, provided you had access to a 3D printer.

Through MKCC Discord