Joe Scotto's Latest Eye-Catching Hand-Wired Keyboard Is an RP2040-Powered Gift for a Gamer

Open-hardware keyboard maker Joe Scotto has unveiled his latest design, an eye-catching ortholinear layout device with oversized spacebar and high-performance gaming switches — hiding beneath colorful Comic Sans keycaps.

"The Scotto61 is a 61-key ortholinear keyboard with a 7u spacebar," Scotto writes of the tenkeyless design, built to be relatively compact. "It was designed and built as a Christmas gift for my brother. Since he does a lot of gaming, I went with Akko Crystal Silver switches because they have a 1.6mm actuation point."

Inside the eye-catching 3D-printed case, which holds each of the 61 switches in place, the keyboard is powered by a Raspberry Pi Pico clone with a difference: the device uses the same dual-core Raspberry Pi RP2040 microcontroller but packs a 16MB flash chip — along with an on-board user-addressable WS2812 RGB LED, a USB Type-C connector, and a slightly oversized board footprint compared with the original.

This is far from Scotto's first hand-wired keyboard, of course. The maker has a range of designs including a one-handed device inspired by the Frogpad, an ultra-thin wing-like layout, a single-microcontroller split board, and one which has a secret to tell: it's actually a mouse, powered by a Raspberry Pi RP2040 microcontroller.

As with all of Scotto's keyboards, the Scotto61 is hand-wired: there's no printed circuit board, but instead rigid copper wiring is used to build up the keyboard matrix. The rows and columns are then connected to the microcontroller's general-purpose input/output (GPIO) pins and ready by a QMK-based firmware.

More information on the keyboard is available on Scotto's website, while the design — and all prior designs — is available on GitHub under the reciprocal Creative Commons Attribution-NoCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 license.