The heart of ANAVI Macro Pad 8 is Microchip ATmega32U4. It is an 8-bit microcontroller with 32K bytes of ISP Flash, USB Controller and I2C. It is part of the AVR family of microcontrollers developed since 1996 by Atmel and acquired by Microchip Technology in 2016.

Microchip ATmega32U4 can be found on various popular development boards such as Arduino Leonardo, SparkFun Pro Micro, Teensy 2.0, Olimex eduArdu and many more… It is also a great fit for mechanical keyboards!

Thanks to Microchip ATmega32U4, ANAVI Macro Pad 8 connects to the USB of your personal computer, drives the mini OLED display through I2C and has more than enough general-purpose input/output (GPIO) pins for the mechanical switches. Furthermore, the Quantum Mechanical Keyboard (QMK) Firmware supports Microchip ATmega32U4 and therefore it is easy to use as the default firmware for ANAVI Macro Pad 8. However, it is technically also possible use ANAVI Macro Pad 8 as a development board and upload Arduino sketches compatible with Arduino Leonardo through Arduino IDE or PlatformIO.

One more thing… Happy Hacktoberfest and open source hardware month! Stay safe and enjoy October!

Best regards,
Leon