GoKawiilI Made a Million Dollar Product from My Dorm Room
2025-03-23
This post shares the story of the nice!nano; a wireless, Pro Micro-compatible microcontroller board I made in my freshman year of college. The nice!nano powers tens of thousands of keyboards, has inspired many, and changed my life.
Over my first winter break in college, I created what I called the Dissatisfaction65, a wireless 65% keyboard inspired by the Satisfaction75. I don’t remember exactly why, but I wanted to try making a DIY wireless keyboard after having made a few wired ones. The Adafruit 32u4 Bluefruit LE microcontroller was used to accomplish wireless since the open-source QMK keyboard firmware supported Bluetooth with this specific board. The project looked great in the end, but its performance was awful. The typing latency was nearly unusable, and it only lasted a few days on battery even with a huge battery inside.
Seeing all the low-latency, long battery-life wireless products from companies like Logitech and Apple, I knew that something better was possible. In the next two months I dove into the world of wireless microcontrollers and DIY keyboards. I quickly learned that Nordic microchips were the hobbyist’s choice and the Pro Micro format reigned as king for DIY keyboards. In my search I discovered three microcontrollers trying to fill the gap between the two: the BlueMicro, the nRFMicro, and the BLE-Micro-Pro.1
Board Retail Cost Form Factor Open Source BlueMicro N/A Too Large Yes nRFMicro N/A Yes Yes BLE-Micro-Pro ~$40 Yes No
The BlueMicro’s form factor meant that I couldn’t build most Pro Micro keyboards since it would interfere. The BLE-Micro-Pro was pretty expensive, locked down, and only sold in Japan. The nRFMicro was pretty close. At first, I decided to modify the nRFMicro to fit my needs, but I soon realized my goals were a bit too ambitious, so I restarted from scratch.
The nice!nano was born#
The weekend (yes, the whole thing was designed in a weekend) I created the nice!nano, I don’t think I left my desk for more than sleeping and getting food from the dining hall maybe three times. It was just me, KiCad, Nordic’s Infocenter2, nRFMicro wiki, and the Adafruit nRF52840 Feather schematic. I put together the schematic and BOM, laid out the PCB, and routed (and re-routed) the connections. On the other side I came out with the thinnest Pro Micro compatible nRF52840 based board.
Over the next week I created a name and found my PCB assembler. The name is based on my online username, “Nicell”. I wanted to continue the spirit of metric naming of the Pro Micro and came up with “nice!nano”. The stylized lower-case pixel font mark was created to sit atop the antenna. After reaching out to a few assemblers, the cheapest option for producing five was about $100. That was a lot to spend on what could’ve easily been a broken design, but after a few days of meticulously re-reviewing my designs, I paid.3
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