I’ve been wanting a macropad for a while, but to be a really useful complement to the keyboard this would need a display. There appear to exist some OLED solutions, but iirc they were very pricey and probably didn’t support Linux very well.

Unfortunately nobody makes what might be a cheap display-enabled solution, namely a macropad with a regular, large LCD character display matrix, with buttons arranged on the side to each line, like a quickdial.

This is probably not super hard to realize with Arduino (though I would be unsure which interface to use; possibly serial over USB? Then implement an evdev driver?). Getting it nicely looking and sturdy would be much harder, though. So if anyone is going to market something like this let me know. ;)