Keybow and Keybow MINI

Buy Keybow and Keybow MINI here

Keybow is an easy-to-build, solderless, DIY mini mechanical keyboard, 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.

Keybow MINI is a three-key version of it's older sibling, Keybow.

This Keybow OS is RAM-disk-based and built upon a stripped-down Raspbian, with C bindings that setup and run the USB HID, and a series of Lua-based scripts to customise the key layouts and lighting.

Using the Keybow software

Format a micro-SD card in FAT32 format (we recommend the SD Association's SD Card Formatter, and then drop the contents of the sdcard folder (only the files inside the folder) onto the freshly-formatted micro-SD card.

You can grab the latest keybow-x.x.x.zip file from https://github.com/pimoroni/keybow-firmware/releases and unzip it directly to your SD card.

Learn more about how to use Keybow on our learning portal.

Building

You'll need a build toolchain.

sudo apt install build-essential autoconf libtool libconfig-dev libpng-dev

bcm2835

Build the bcm2835 library and install into a local build directory for static linking.

cd bcm2835-*.**
autoreconf -f -i
mkdir build
./configure --prefix=$(pwd)/build
make
make install
cd ..

libusbgx

sudo apt install libconfig-dev
cd libusbgx
autoreconf -i
mkdir build
./configure --prefix=$(pwd)/build
make
make install
cd ..

lua

sudo apt install libreadline-dev
cd lua-5.3.5
make linux
cd ..