How a Weekend KiCad Project Became the nice!nano Keyboard Empire

Nick Winans recounts building the nice!nano, an nRF52840-based Pro Micro-compatible microcontroller board for wireless DIY keyboards, during his college freshman year. Frustrated by his first wireless keyboard build’s high latency and poor battery life, he spent a weekend designing the board in KiCad, drawing from the nRFMicro wiki and Adafruit reference schematics. His first batch of five prototypes worked on arrival, delivering roughly 100x better power efficiency than his previous attempt, and a Reddit post sparked enough demand to justify a group buy.

The June 2020 group buy sold all 1,000 units in seven hours, but Winans swore off the model afterward — citing the stress of holding customer funds without product and the keyboard community’s history of group-buy fraud. The hardware also needed firmware: a chance connection with Pete Johanson, who was building a Zephyr-based wireless keyboard firmware, produced ZMK, now a dominant project in the space. Winans later co-founded Typeractive with his retired parents to sell wireless-focused split keyboard kits.

By 2023, the open-source design had been cloned twice by manufacturers shipping boards labeled as nice!nanos and flashed with his unmodified firmware, appearing on AliExpress and even his own vendors’ shelves. Winans notes he had little recourse — a familiar tension for small open-hardware makers whose designs power a category they no longer fully control.