Arnov Sharma's "Raspberry Pi 1000" Is Ready for Those Impatient for the Raspberry Pi 500's Release

Maker Arnov Sharma has decided to stop waiting for Raspberry Pi to build the Raspberry Pi 500 and simply make one himself — creating the highly-unofficial "Raspberry Pi 1000," which packs a Raspberry Pi 5 and a keyboard into an all-in-one chassis.

"The [Raspberry] Pi 1000 [is a] newly created Raspberry Pi 400 DIY alternative," Sharma explains of his design, "a portable keyboard-computer that combines a Raspberry Pi setup with a keyboard. Our version, like the Raspberry Pi 400, has a whole Raspberry Pi setup packed inside a keyboard."

The real Raspberry Pi 400 launched back in November 2020 as what Raspberry Pi's Eben Upton described as the company's first real "consumer product" — taking the core technology from a Raspberry Pi 4 single-board computer and packing it inside a keyboard to create an all-in-one inspired by the eight-bit microcomputers of the 1980s and the 16-bit machines that followed.

Last year's release of the considerably more powerful Raspberry Pi 5 had fans clamoring for a Raspberry Pi 500 to match, but thus far the company has been quiet on a timeline for such a release — with Sharma stepping in to offer a do-it-yourself alternative for those unwilling to wait.

In addition to the Raspberry Pi 5 itself, and the official cooler, Sharma's "Raspberry Pi 1000" includes the Raspberry Pi M.2 HAT+ and a high-speed solid-state drive (SSD) for storage — "it takes about 5-6 seconds for this setup to boot to the desktop," Sharma says of its performance — and a custom-built volume knob which protrudes from the side. This, the maker explains, is powered by a Seeed Studio XIAO SAMD21 microcontroller, appearing to the system as a USB Human Interface Device (HID).

Sharma has documented the project in full here on Hackster, with design files and source code published under the permissive MIT license.