Assembling the Adafruit Macropad and Setting It Up

The team at Adafruit have an excellent educational component to their commercial site that provides clear directions for assembling your macropad and programming it to do what you want. This documentation will direct you to those instructions rather than attempting to improve upon them. After your macropad is assembled, visit the page on Installing the Code to make your macropad a tool for working with Typewright and XPath.

Assembling the Macropad

See this page to put together your macropad after receiving it. This might seem a bit intimidating for some at first, but mostly requires reading the directions closely, putting a few tiny bolts on nuts, and snapping plastic pieces into place.

Installing the Software

The chip that runs the macropad is small and has much less memory than a regular computer, so it uses a simple programming language called CircuitPython. After assembling the macropad, you must install the latest version of this software to your macropad before we can add the code that will let you tell the macropad what to do.

To download the CircuitPython software, follow this link. These directions from Adafruit will show you where you can find the latest version of the software as well as how to put your new macropad in “bootloader” mode so that you can install CircuitPython. Once you complete the software download and install it on your macropad, you do not need to continue following the directions on the ensuing pages (such as “installing the Mu editor”). However, if you wish to customize your macropad in any way, you will find all the information that you need in the rest of the Adafruit tutorial.

Once you have assembled your macropad and installed CircuitPython, you are ready to make this a Typewright Macropad. To include the code to make this a tool for working with Typewright and XPath, you need to visit the Installing the Code page to install the proper code so that the keys will insert your Typewright markup and XPath commands for you.