Boards of a Feather Type Together with arturo182's Keyboard FeatherWing
Easily add a QWERTY keyboard and 2.6" color touchscreen to your Adafruit Feather-based project!
Followers of @arturo182's Twitter feed are accustomed to the smörgåsbord of amazing projects that the prolific Swedish-based hardware hacker serves up on a regular basis, but today's announcement was something special. Launching as the first product under his new Solder Party moniker, the Keyboard FeatherWing may appear at first glance to be some sort of de-cased BlackBerry Q10 — likely due to the fact that it actually uses an excess stock Q10 keyboard — but flip it over, and the "party" trick is revealed!
The clue of course being the second part of the name: we've seen the Keyboard, now, here's the FeatherWing: the famous 28-pin header from Adafruit's Feather specification, allowing your choice of nRF52840, ESP32, SAM D21 and so many more MCUs. But wait! Just adding a battle-tested keyboard and a 2.6" 320x240 resistive touchscreen to your Feather is apparently not enough: the board also features a center-mounted five-way button, flanked by a further four soft tactile buttons, a microSD slot, and a NeoPixel for status indication! Dual-row sockets mean access to all pins as well, even with your Feather mounted!
Example code is provided for Arduino and CircuitPython, including a finger-painting demo and an example of receiving text from the keyboard over UART. The possibilities for this board are immense, given the wide range of available Feather boards — perhaps someone will even recreate the BlackBerry messaging experience using a LoRa Feather!
A look at its specs:
- 2.6" 320x240 16-bit color LCD with resistive touchscreen (SPI)
- BB Q10 QWERTY keyboard (I2C via SAM D20)
- Five-way button
- Four soft tactile buttons
- NeoPixel
- microSD connector
- Stemma QT/Qwiic connector
- On/off switch (connected to the Feather Enable pin)
- GPIO expander
- Dual row sockets
- Four mounting holes
- GPIO solder jumpers
The Solder Party Keyboard FeatherWing is now available now on Tindie for $55, or KiCad source files and firmware are up on GitHub if you'd like to make your own!