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Supported Hardware

With the solid technical foundation of Zephyr™ RTOS, ZMK can support a wide variety of hardware targets, including but not limited to Nordic nRF52, Raspberry Pi RP2040/RP2350, most ST STM32 MCUs, and Microchip SAMD21. ZMK has the potential to run on any hardware supported by Zephyr™, such as those on the Zephyr™ supported boards page, though you may need to do some additional work to configure them for ZMK. That being said, there are specific boards that have been tested and pre-configured by the ZMK contributors, denoted by the zmk board variants below.

Designing a new keyboard? Check out the Hardware Integration section for more information on how to configure ZMK to run on your custom hardware.

Boards, Board Variants, and Shields

ZMK uses the Zephyr concepts of "boards" and "shields" to refer to different parts of a keyboard build that are then combined during a firmware build. Please see the explainer on boards & shields for more details.

Zephyr boards come with minimal configuration. ZMK board variants add the necessary configuration to make the board usable out of the box with ZMK.

Composite Keyboards​

Composite keyboards are composed of two main PCBs: a small controller board with exposed pads, and a larger keyboard PCB (a shield, in ZMK lingo) with switch footprints. The board and shield share the same interconnect standard, which defines the physical and electrical specifications for the PCB-to-PCB connection.

Boards and shields that share the same interconnect are usually compatible with each other but not always. Check hardware compatibility before connecting them.

Designing a custom composite keyboard with an off-the-shelf controller board? Check out the New Keyboard Shield guide.

Pro Micro Interconnect​

The SparkFun Pro Micro grew popular as a low cost ATmega32U4 board with sufficient GPIO and peripherals to work for many keyboard needs. Since the original Pro Micro, many pin compatible boards have appeared with various changes or improvements.

Boards

Shields

Seeed XIAO Interconnect​

The Seeed Studio XIAO is a popular smaller format micro-controller, that has gained popularity as an alternative to the SparkFun Pro Micro. Since its creation, several pin compatible controllers, such as the Seeed Studio XIAO nRF52840 (also known as XIAO BLE), Adafruit QT Py and Adafruit QT Py RP2040, have become available.

Boards

Shields

Arduino Uno Rev3 Interconnect​

The Arduino Uno Rev3 is a board who's popularity lead to countless shields being developed for it. By natural extension, once there were many shields designed for it, many other *boards* began to be developed that were compatible to leverage the extensive available shields. Today, many dev kits come with Uno headers to make it easy to work with them.

Boards

Shields

BlackPill Interconnect​

The WeAct Studio BlackPill has grown in popularity due to its low price, availability, and utilization of the powerful STM32F4x1CEU6 microcontroller. The BlackPill features more GPIO than most other boards, but also has a comparatively larger footprint as a result. Many clones and variations of the original BlackPill are available on the market as an affordable and more powerful alternative to many popular boards. The official WeAct variations of the WeAct Studio BlackPill are powered by the STM32F411CEU6 and STM32F401CEU6 microcontrollers.

Boards

Shields

    MakerDiary nRF52840 M.2 Interconnect​

    The MakerDiary nRF52840 M.2 module is a module using the M.2/NGFF form factor to expose a large number of GPIO pins, allowing use of a variety of peripherals such using I2C, SPI, etc.

    Boards

    Shields

    Onboard Controller Keyboards​

    Keyboards with onboard controllers are single PCBs that contain all the components of a keyboard, including the controller chip, switch footprints, etc.

    Designing a custom keyboard with an onboard controller? Check out the New Board guide.

    Other Hardware​

    In addition to the basic keyboard functionality, there is also support for additional keyboard hardware such as encoders, RGB underglow, backlight and displays. Please see pages under the "Features" header in the sidebar for details.

    ZMK doesn't support boards with AVR 8-bit processors, such as the ATmega32U4, because Zephyr™ only supports 32-bit and 64-bit platforms. As a result, controllers like the SparkFun Pro Micro, Elite-C, and Arduino Uno Rev3 are NOT supported by ZMK.