We are fans of macro pads and especially homebrew ones. The Apna Dost project by [np_vishwakarma] ticks most of our boxes. In addition to a few buttons, there’s an encoder, an OLED display, and it runs QMK firmware. Plus, it looks good, too.

We like that the system uses an RP2040. It is possible you have everything you need to put one of these together right now. We would wish for a few more keys, but it wouldn’t be hard to add them, either.

Perhaps we would have laid it out so the OLED could more easily label the macro keys, but — again — you could do that easily if you wanted to build your own. We did like that encoder could serve multiple purposes.

It always ticks us off when cheap macro pads you buy don’t use QMK or some other reasonable firmware. This one does, though, so it should be very easy to modify and customize.

We converted an old conference badge to a QMK macro pad of sorts. If you want a real deep dive on a much larger macro pad, that’s out there, too.