For the past 5 years I’ve been obsessed about finding a super quick way to make hobby-grade PCBs at home. The race I was looking to win was the “I don’t want to wait 3 weeks being able to do nothing after I remembered that I2C needs in-series resistors”. I want to get my board in my hands in about an hour without doing much.
And I found the way, but most importantly, I found the workflow. Let me show you!
Often the nRF52 micros get stuck or misbehave and reach a weird state with the pairings. Often the solution is just to clear them so here’s adafruit’s code to do that and a platform.io ini to make it easy.
platformio.ini
[env:clearbonds]
platform = nordicnrf52
board = particle_xenon
framework = arduino
The board can be any nrf52 board, it can be any generic board that uses the same chip that you actually have. For example particle_xenon uses nRF52840, so it can be used for any 52840 board. It might though not flash the correct LEDs, so just hook up the serial port.
Oh Rust, how much I love you… Love at first third sight, like I had with my English teacher. She was ugly but I was 10 and she was a female that stood near me for an hour and talked to me in a soothing voice. That’s what Rust is, ugly but it’s there for you with a soothing voice.
On the other side we have C++ that the Arduino Framework is written on. Classes here and there, mixed with C, requiring a 3 day workshop to understand what’s the “standard” way of blinking a LED - hence the headache of each Arduino library taking the matters on their own hands. I hate reading C++ by the way and don’t know how to write it. That’s why I want to just forget about it and just call it from Rust.
This is a small journey on how I reverse engineered the MagicForce 68 keyboard and tried to add bluetooth functionality to it. It’s a small keyboard (68 keys, 65%) and is USB-only (it’s not the smart model). It has a controller that I can’t flash with a custom firmware, so I had to hook wires on it.
The first step in determining what I was against, was to at least partially disassemble the keyboard.