In a world that has no shortage of macropads, the duckyPad still managed to set itself apart. The open source mechanical pad offered an incredible array of customization options, and thanks to its onboard OLED display, you never had to wonder which key did what. But there’s always room for improvement.
Announced earlier today, the duckyPad Pro is the culmination of everything creator [dekuNukem] learned from developing, marketing, and supporting the original duckyPad. Much hasn’t changed — it looks largely the same, offers the same RGB-backlit mechanical switches, and the trademark OLED is still there, although it’s gotten a little larger. The obvious changes are the addition of five more keys, and a pair of rotary encoders.
The most exciting changes are the things you can’t see. For one, the duckyPad Pro is now powered by the ESP32-S3. This not only provides considerably more processing power and storage, but also allows the new pad to connect over Bluetooth. Naturally that also means WiFi is along for the ride, which could offer some interesting hacking potential down the line.
Upgrading the brains of the operation has also allowed for considerable expansion of the duckyPad’s already impressive scripting capabilities; [dekuNukem] boasts the new Pro model can type out the entire script for the Bee Movie at the touch of a button. That’s gotta be worth the cost of admission alone.
We’re also very interested in the expansion capabilities offered by the duckyPad Pro. While there’s not much technical information available this early in the game, the video below shows how you can create custom hardware interfaces that range from button boxes for flight simulators to assistive devices. This feature reminds us a bit of the Xbox Adaptive Controller, and we can’t wait to see what the community does with it.
You’re probably wondering how much this marvel will set you back. Unfortunately we don’t yet have an answer for that, as [dekuNukem] says the final price of the duckyPad Pro is still undecided. But we suspect it won’t be long before we know more — the Kickstarter for the new pad is set to go live next month.
This might be really cool with some KiCAD and FreeCAD keymaps. I started making my own spin on this like two years ago, but maybe the OLED is worth it instead of using re-legendable keys. My big dumb idea was to use encoders for part rotation and track width, a toggle switch to flip between schematic and layout mode, one round red button for ESC, and a paltry 4 keys for other stuff. It started to feel a bit like a busy-box though and I lost interest.
I made a very similar one for using with KiCAD and FreeCAD. I barely ever use it. Not because it works poorly, in fact I can program it to do ANYTHING, but you do need to spend a lot of time refining your workflow so that its a usable tool, and not just another peripheral that needs to be on your desk which can only do a limited subset of what your keyboard can do.
The last thing I used it for was grinding skill levels in a game called morrowind. I let my PC run and let the skill levels rise overnight by it performing combos to make my in-game character cast spells for a while, then go to sleep to regain mana
I wonder how hard this would be to sync up with home assistant so it could be used to activate various script tasks