Joe Scotto's Latest Hand-Wired Keyboard Is a Compact Gadget for Live Streaming: The ScottoDeck
Designed for rapid access to 10 presets and with a pair of rotary encoders, this compact keyboard is a live streaming must-have.
Homebrew keyboard maker Joe Scotto has unveiled a new, ultra-compact design for a macropad built with video streaming in mind: the eight-key, two-knob 3D-printed ScottoDeck.
"The ScottoDeck is an eight-key macropad with two EC11 encoders designed for live streaming," Scotto explains of his latest design. "It uses Drop Holy Panda [mechanical keyboard switches] and was designed and built live on YouTube. I also printed it completely solid and added weights so it doesn't move around easily. There isn't really much to say about it other than it works and I'm happy with it."
The layout of the U-shaped macropad is simple: two rows of four switches, with 3D-printed flat-topped keycaps mounted atop, take up the bulk of the device, while two 3D-printed knobs on top of the rotary encoders provide twistable inputs for anything from volume mixing to video fading — while sticking up from the top like rabbit ears.
This latest design marks Scotto's second release of 2024, after unveiling the ScottoKatana earlier this month — an eye-catching fully-3D-printed split layout keyboard in which the curvature of the key columns on each side is backwards compared to more traditional layouts. While designed to take up a minimum of space while still including a full-size spacebar, though, the ScottoKatana is considerably bulkier than the ScottoDeck — which, to be fair, would be tricky to use as a device's main input method owing to having only eight keys.
As with the ScottoKatana, the ScottoDeck includes no PCB; instead the switches are mounted directly into the 3D-printed housing and wired by hand to a Raspberry Pi RP2040-based microcontroller board designed to mimic the Arduino Micro layout. The microcontroller, which provides a USB Type-C connector for power and data, runs a QMK-based firmware with Vial configuration support.
More information on the build is available on Scotto's website, while the design files have been published to GitHub under the Creative Commons Attribution-NoCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 license.