Make it more beginnerfriendly

[Donnervogel]

I would love to see some cheap and beginnerfriendly boards supportet. Like the pi pico w, waveshare rp2040 zero, waveshare esp32-c6-mini, DFRobot Beetle ESP 32 C6 and the ESP32 NodeMCU. Because not everyone has the money to buy an nice nano or something simular. So these Boards would make it easier to beginn with custom keyboards and zmk. Espacially for students. Sadly i cant really Code, so i cant implement the boards myself.

[Nick-Munnich]

For boards, we typically rely on Zephyr. You can see a list of boards that Zephyr supports for our current version of Zephyr here, and you can see the list once we update to the most recent version here. The pi pico (non-w), seeeduino series, and some blackpills are examples of cheap and beginner friendly boards that our current version of Zephyr (and thus ZMK) supports.

[ilikeheaps]

Also there are cheaper boards similar to nice nano: https://github.com/joric/nrfmicro/wiki/Alternatives#supermini-nrf52840

[caksoylar]

Regarding specifically ESP32 chips, they have limitations that make it impractical for battery-powered (or not) keyboard use (from @xudongzheng on Discord):

• Power consumption for all three are pretty bad, maybe 100x-1000x compared to Nordic microcontrollers, so not great for battery-powered builds
• ESP32-C3 and ESP32-C6 lack USB
• ESP32-S3 technically supports USB, but not with Zephyr ATM