Good MCU for QMK?

[ThunderFart]

Hey guys, I got tired of chasing the perfect keyboard, so I decided to build my own. I am not new to Kicad and I'm a software engineer myself, so I think I can pull it off.

That said, I've been glancing at QMK and wondering if this MCU would work with it?

[LightningXI]

Hey guys, I got tired of chasing the perfect keyboard, so I decided to build my own. I am not new to Kicad and I'm a software engineer myself, so I think I can pull it off.

That said, I've been glancing at QMK and wondering if this MCU would work with it?

A lot of QMK compatible boards nowadays will use ARM chips -- so yeah, STM32 or Atmel ATMega -- most importantly as long as it has a pre-loaded (from factory) and non-removable bootloader, you should be good.

There's also recent development on Rpi2040 compatibility but that's pretty recent so I haven't seen much documentation around it.

Always check the QMK docs to be sure it works with the firmware. https://docs.qmk.fm/#/flashing?id=flashing-instructions-and-bootloader-information

You can also join their Discord server to ask questions, I'd wager.

[xjack312]

I can vouch for the RP2040, super easy to get up and running using the hardware design guide and is expandable. The RP2040 has imo the easiest bootloader to work with as it just shows up as a USB device that you can drag the .uf2 firmware to. I don't have experience running anything more than just a switch matrix with it but there I've seen boards that have a ton of features (OLEDs, knobs, etc), since it has a good amount of I/O.

Hardware design guide: https://datasheets.raspberrypi.com/rp2040/hardware-design-with-rp2040.pdf