Rotary Numpad

rotary_numpad

This is a personal project of mine where I wanted a number pad that I can put on the left side of keyboard that doesn't have a numberpad. I fell in love with the feel of rotary encoders on my 3d printer, so added three to be able to play around with.

How to build from scratch

I handsoldered gateron blue switches to a 3D printed case. The design is modified from the Ultipad.
I used a sparkfun Pro Micro as my microcontroller and the pinout can be found in the info.json. I found this site
to be very useful to identify different pins. You can find useful information on rotary encoders from the qmk docs here and here.

matrix

Due to the three rotary encoders, I had to use most of the available pins. Fortunately, all the buttons still fit in a 6x4 matrix. Looking at the diagram below, the three buttons in the first column correspond to each encoder button.

        ┌──┐┌──┐┌──┐┌──┐
        │0A││0B││0C││0D│
┌──┐    └──┘└──┘└──┘└──┘
│5A│
└──┘    ┌──┐┌──┐┌──┐┌──┐
        │1A││1B││1C││1D│
        └──┘└──┘└──┘└──┘
        ┌──┐┌──┐┌──┐┌──┐
        │2A││2B││2C││2D│
┌──┐    └──┘└──┘└──┘│  │
│3D│    ┌──┐┌──┐┌──┐│  │
└──┘    │3A││3B││3C││  │
        └──┘└──┘└──┘└──┘
        ┌──┐┌──┐┌──┐┌──┐
        │4A││4B││4C││4D│
        └──┘└──┘└──┘│  │
┌──┐    ┌──────┐┌──┐│  │
│5D│    │5B    ││5C││  │
└──┘    └──────┘└──┘└──┘

Flashing

Make example for this keyboard (after setting up your build environment):

qmk compile -kb handwired/rabijl/rotary_numpad -km default

Flashing example for this keyboard:

qmk flash -kb handwired/rabijl/rotary_numpad -km default

See the build environment setup and the make instructions for more information. Brand new to QMK? Start with our Complete Newbs Guide.

Bootloader

Enter the bootloader in 3 ways:

  • Short reset leads: tap the reset lead to ground twice quickly after qmk is in flash mode
  • Keycode in layout: double tap the key mapped to QK_BOOT. On the default keymap this can be found by holding in key (0,C) and tapping key (0,A), see the matrix section for the positions of these keys.
  • Bootmagic reset: Hold down the key at (0,A) in the matrix (see matrix section) and plug in the keyboard

Note: if the keyboard doesn't show up after putting the keyboard in reset mode, check that your user is added to the tty and/or uucp groups.
You may need to logout after adding these groups to your user, for the changes to take affect.