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-5.4.0
make linux
cd ..