5 ms·

If you're not designing your own microcontroller, you might want to check out the Proton-C. It has 248kB of usable flash memory, which could be enough to store

by ihuman 7y ago

If you're not designing your own microcontroller, you might want to check out the Proton-C. It has 248kB of usable flash memory, which could be enough to store a stenography-optimized word list in addition to the firmware. It was made to be flashed with the qmk keyboard firmware, but I don't think there's any requirement that you have to use qmk. https://qmk.fm/proton-c/ https://qmk.fm/proton-c/

jrockway 7y ago
I used an STM32F103 for my last keyboard, and you can buy four for the price of a Proton C. I am still not sure why they chose the F3 series for the Proton C, as it doesn't seem to be a chip that's commonly used in the maker community. I am somewhat surprised they didn't bite the bullet and just port QMK to the nRF52 (since everyone wants bluetooth out of the box), actually. The F103 is also interesting in that it is well-supported by Rust and Tinygo, if C isn't your thing. I picked it because QMK supports it (and works great), but I'm actually planning to write the firmware in Go and ditch all the things that bug me about QMK. However the USB stack is not there and I dread writing it. I might pull a QMK and just have ChibiOS run my Go code ;)
- ihuman 7y ago
  The F3 series includes support for "analog peripherals," so maybe they decided on that line so they could support the speaker? If that's correct, then that's a pretty niche feature for them to focus on. There are forks of qmk and the pro-micro that support the nRF52, but as far as I can tell nothing has been merged into the main qmk yet.
- lmilcin 7y ago
  I was actually planning to run it on F103 as I already have couple of them laying around. And I also wanted to try it in Rust mostly to get some experience with it. I was initially thinking about something that is already bluetooth enabled like ESP32 or CC2640R2 (I have development boards for both of these) but the design suddenly gets exponentially more complex if you want to get it right. Also, neither has a package that I can easily solder. I know it is just aesthetics, but I really like a clean board.

by ihuman 7y ago

jrockway 7y ago

I used an STM32F103 for my last keyboard, and you can buy four for the price of a Proton C. I am still not sure why they chose the F3 series for the Proton C, as it doesn't seem to be a chip that's commonly used in the maker community. I am somewhat surprised they didn't bite the bullet and just port QMK to the nRF52 (since everyone wants bluetooth out of the box), actually. The F103 is also interesting in that it is well-supported by Rust and Tinygo, if C isn't your thing. I picked it because QMK supports it (and works great), but I'm actually planning to write the firmware in Go and ditch all the things that bug me about QMK. However the USB stack is not there and I dread writing it. I might pull a QMK and just have ChibiOS run my Go code ;)

ihuman 7y ago
The F3 series includes support for "analog peripherals," so maybe they decided on that line so they could support the speaker? If that's correct, then that's a pretty niche feature for them to focus on. There are forks of qmk and the pro-micro that support the nRF52, but as far as I can tell nothing has been merged into the main qmk yet.
lmilcin 7y ago
I was actually planning to run it on F103 as I already have couple of them laying around. And I also wanted to try it in Rust mostly to get some experience with it. I was initially thinking about something that is already bluetooth enabled like ESP32 or CC2640R2 (I have development boards for both of these) but the design suddenly gets exponentially more complex if you want to get it right. Also, neither has a package that I can easily solder. I know it is just aesthetics, but I really like a clean board.