Keybow Mini Mechanical Keyboard Kit Pimoroni

DESCRIPTION

RETIRED PRODUCT – We’ve stopped stocking this product or it has been retired by the manufacturer and is no longer for sale. This page remains available for its resources and as a source of potential interest.

Keybow is an easy-to-build, solderless, DIY mini mechanical keyboard. It’s Raspberry Pi-powered, with twelve illuminated keys, hot-swap clicky or linear switches, clear keycaps, and awesome customisable layouts and macros. It’s the ultimate macro pad.

This kit has everything needed to build your own mini mechanical keyboard except a micro SD card. It’s a fun, affordable, first step into the world of mechanical keyboards, with high-quality clicky (Gold) or linear (Silver) Kailh Speed switches and clear DSA-profile keycaps that look incredible when lit up with the per-key RGB lighting. The fancy hot-swap Kailh sockets mean that absolutely no soldering is required! 

FEATURES

• Per-key RGB LEDs (APA102)
• Kailh hot-swap switch sockets (for Cherry MX-compatible switches)
• 40-pin female header
• I2C breakout header for add-ons
• Custom Keybow OS
• Compatible with Raspberry Pi 3B+, 3, 2, B+, A+, Zero, and Zero W
• Assembled size: 85×56.5x38mm

Kit includes:

• Raspberry Pi Zero WH
• Keybow PCB
• Switchplate
• Twelve Kailh Speed switches (Gold or Silver)
• Twelve clear DSA-profile keycaps
• Acrylic baseplate
• Fixings and feet
• Micro-USB cable
• Comes in a reusable kit box

Use as a hotkey pad for your favourite program like Adobe Lightroom, a custom games controller, trigger clips, tracks, or effects in Ableton Live, or to paste frequently-used text or code snippets. So, if you want to open your web browser and search for cat GIFs with a single keypress, you’re covered. All your key and lighting customisation is stored on the device, and it’s completely portable, so you can switch your setups between any machine.

Powered by a Raspberry Pi Zero WH (with a pre-soldered header) it uses the Zero’s USB HID gadget mode so it appears as a real keyboard when plugged into your computer with the included USB cable. Pimoroni has built a completely custom, stripped-down, RAM-disk-based Keybow OS with a Lua interface to customise the layout and lighting on your Keybow. It’s Windows, Mac, and Linux-compatible.

RESOURCES

Construction

It has a 40-pin female header, like a regular Pi HAT, that plugs into the 40-pin male header on the included Raspberry Pi Zero WH. The Pi is attached to the acrylic baseplate and shim, and the whole thing is rigidly held together by metal standoffs. Rubber feet on the baseplate stop Keybow from slipping around on your desk.

Full tutorial on how to assemble your Keybow here.

Mechanical switches

Keybow comes with your choice of Kailh Speed Gold (clicky) or Silver (linear, non-clicky) switches. Both are light and smooth, and the gold switches have a satisfying click when pressed.

They’ve chosen clear DSA keycaps, to show off the per-key RGB LEDs. The slightly frosted finish on the clear keycaps diffuses the light beautifully. Being DSA, the caps have a flat profile that suits the small size of Keybow.

The switches slot into the PCB switch plate to hold them securely, and then push into the Kailh hot-swap sockets on the Keybow PCB. This means that there’s no soldering required, and you can easily change out the switches when you wish.

Note that if you want to use different switches with Keybow, then you’ll need to ensure that they have a recess on the underside for surface-mount LEDs.

Lighting

We’ve used the same tiny APA102 RGB LEDs that we use on our Picade Plasma PCBs, and there’s one under each of the twelve keys. The LEDs sit in the cavity on the underside of the switch and shine up through, into the keycap.

There’s a nifty way to light and animate the LEDs on Keybow. You can create a PNG file with a coloured gradient or pattern, and it will be animated across the LEDs from the top of the image to the bottom. The width of the PNG determines how it’s displayed.

You can also manually set the LEDs on one or more keys, overriding the animation, or have them only light up when pressed.

There are a bunch of example animations to use, or you can create your own in your favourite graphics program.

Key mappings and layouts

Its power is in how customisable it is. You can map each of the twelve keys to whichever keyboard keys you want, or even have them trigger a whole series of keypresses or strings of text to be entered.

The Keybow software uses the on-the-go micro-USB port on the Raspberry Pi Zero WH and USB HID gadget mode, so that it appears as a regular USB keyboard device when plugged into a computer.

The custom, stripped-down OS runs on a RAM-disk, meaning that it boots and runs quickly, it’s robust against being unplugged, and there’s no risk of SD card corruption.

To customise the layout and lighting, just pop the micro-SD card out and edit the keys.lua file on your computer.

They’ve included a bunch of useful code snippets and helper functions for Windows and Mac that can be used in your Keybow layouts, as well as whole example layouts.

You can read how to set up the Keybow OS and how to create your own macros and key layouts here on our learning portal.