Go Ape With A Banana Macropad

The super fun thing about macro pads is that they’re inherently ultra-personalized, so why not have fun with them? This appealing little keeb may have been a joke originally, but [dapperrogue] makes a valid point among a bunch of banana-related puns on the project page — the shape makes it quite the ergonomic little input device.

Inside this open-source banana is that perennial favorite for macro pads, the Arduino Pro Micro, and eight switches that are wired up directly to input pins. We’re not sure what flavor of Cherry those switches are, hopefully brown or green, but we suddenly wish Cherry made yellow switches. If you want to build your own, the STLs and code are available, and we know for a fact that other switch purveyors do in fact make yellow-stemmed switches.

Contrary to what the BOM says, we believe the sticker is mandatory because it just makes the build — we imagine there would be fewer double takes without it. Hopefully this fosters future fun keyboard builds from the community, and we can’t wait to sink our teeth into the split version!

There are a bunch of ways to make a macropad, including printing everything but the microcontroller.

Via r/mk and KBD

14 thoughts on “Go Ape With A Banana Macropad

  1. First off, impressive imagination.

    But imagining a use case, I’d think you’d want to have the cable attach to the end of the banana (opposite end from the stem), and I’d like to see the buttons oriented so that when you hold it in your hand, like a pistol grip, your four fingers (and thumb?) lay right on top of the buttons.

    Of course, a wireless Macro Banana would be great, but that would involve writing a driver for the host OS I suspect, greatly increasing the complexity.

    Again, great idea, the maker has a great imagination, and now my mind is contemplating how I could duplicate his achievement – and that’s the sign of a great hack!

    1. Ditto putting the cord out the end. But I’d flip it over from the pic above so you could rest your palm in the curve and rotate your hand slightly so you easily tap any button.
      Ditto it’s really cool, too!

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