nice!nano: A Million-Dollar Product Designed in a Dorm Room

Nick Winans built a wireless microcontroller board during his freshman year of college. The nice!nano is a Pro Micro-compatible board based on Nordic's nRF52840 chip, and it now powers tens of thousands of DIY keyboards worldwide.

A weekend fix for a broken experience

Winans started with Dissatisfaction65, a wireless 65% keyboard built around Adafruit's 32u4 Bluefruit LE module and the open-source QMK firmware. It looked good, but typing latency was nearly unusable and the battery lasted only days despite a large cell. Since Logitech and Apple showed that low-latency wireless was possible, he looked for a better base.

Three boards filled the gap between Nordic chips and the Pro Micro format: BlueMicro, nRFMicro and BLE-Micro-Pro. The first was too large for most Pro Micro keyboards, the second needed heavy changes, and the third cost about $40, was locked down and sold only in Japan. Winans restarted from scratch and designed the nice!nano in one weekend using KiCad, Nordic's documentation and the Adafruit nRF52840 Feather schematic — the thinnest Pro Micro-compatible nRF52840 board at the time. Five assembled units cost about $100.

From a Reddit post to a sold-out group buy

The boards worked. A wireless Lily58 build ran for weeks on a 110mAh battery, against a few days on 2,500mAh for the earlier keyboard: more than a hundredfold gain in power efficiency. A Reddit post drew attention and a Discord community formed around wireless keyboard design.

The group buy opened on June 20 with a minimum of 200 units and a cap of 1,000. The minimum was met within minutes and all 1,000 boards sold in seven hours. Shipping more than 400 orders took two months and help from his family. Winans says holding customers' money without a finished product was stressful, and that he will never run a group buy again.

ZMK, Typeractive and two clones

Firmware was the missing piece. Winans sent pre-production units to Pete Johanson, who had started a wireless keyboard firmware on the Zephyr RTOS. An early ZMK build followed, and by early 2021 a small community had produced a feature-rich wireless firmware. In 2022 Winans and his father launched Typeractive, a store for wireless keyboard kits with a 3D configuration tool; by 2025 it is among the largest split keyboard shops.

The board was cloned twice in 2023, with copies on Taobao, AliExpress and even at some existing vendors, shipped with the same firmware and advertised under the nice!nano name. More than 50,000 units have been sold worldwide, representing over a million dollars in sales. Winans credits timing, luck and contributors such as Joric, Pierre Constantineau and Pete Johanson.