Budget Macropad

Budget Macropad is reverse engineering effort. In order to combat high prices of a fully custom built mechanical macropad, I started looking into re-using commodity membrane number pads and designing a custom board using an ESP32-S3 to replace the controller inside while reusing the existing membrane. It runs a custom firmware written in Zephyr and can be easily ported to ZMK.

This talk focuses a bit on the project and firmware functionality but the main goal is to encourage reverse engineering of commodity hardware because sometimes the answers lie in cheap mass produced commodity hardware.

1. Basic reverse engineering
2. Replicating board layout to build custom replacement hardware
3. Introduction to the Budget Macropad project as a whole
4. Encouraging reverse engineering and a recycle reduce reuse mindset