The Keybow 2040 - A Python-powered Macropad

Hello!

A few months ago, I graduated from a full-time fully-remote Software Engineering Immersive through General Assembly with Zoom as one of our main communication tools. It was a lot of adjusting, I never had online classes before. I have attended online conferences but those don't usually involve fiddling around with your mic and webcam, wondering if people can hear or see you.

One of my recent purchases is a Keybow 2040 from a fun company named Pimoroni (stands for Pirate, Monkey, Robot, Ninja). It runs on Python and acts as a keyboard through something called CircuitPy and Adafruit. I programmed it so I can very easily and quickly enable/disable my webcam and mic on Zoom with a simple press of a button. Among other things, I can control the volume on my PC, play and pause music, skip to the next song or go back to the previous song.

At first, I was afraid to change the default configuration it came with, thinking it would break the macro pad. I didn't have much experience coding in Python at the time. Eventually, I grew confident with each mistake I made. Sometimes it would freeze, I would change a line of code and it would run again. I would try something, break something, fix something, rinse and repeat.