Joe Scotto's Latest Hand-Wired Keyboard Is the Ultra-Thin Yet Screw-Rich ScottoWing

Do-it-yourself keyboard enthusiast Joe Scotto is back with a new design, and it's an interesting take on an ergonomic layout in an ultra-thin chassis — held together with an impressive 96 screws.

"This board is the ScottoWing," Scotto says of his latest keyboard build, "which is my thinnest hand-wired keyboard yet measuring roughly less than 20mm [around 0.79 inches] tall. It's using Choc Silver [switches] because of their transparent housing which perfectly pairs with the resin printed keycaps."

Inside the unusually slim housing is a Waveshare RP2040-Zero, a low-cost microcontroller board based on Raspberry Pi's dual-core RP2040 chip — though Scotto notes the design is also compatible with an Arduino Micro or Raspberry Pi Pico footprint. Each switch is wired with a common ground then to the RP2040-Zero, which acts as the controller and provides USB connectivity for the keyboard.

The unusually-thin housing did bring some challenges, however, including an unwanted flex during typing. Scotto solved this in an interesting, if unusual, way: adding screws. Lots of screws. "One thing you probably notice is how many screws the board has, that was both a stylistic and functionality choice," the maker explains. "Because it's so thin, the plate flexes a lot. Using 48 stand-offs with 96 screws was the solution to this."

This is far from Scotto's first foray into hand-wired keyboard designs. Previous creations include a two-part split keyboard which uses a single microcontroller and a repurposed VGA cable as an interconnect, the one-piece ScottoErgo with rugged USB connector, a one-handed keyboard designed to sub in for the discontinued Frogpad, and a Raspberry Pi RP2040-based device which is actually a not-so-secret mouse. All have one thing in common: their switches are connected using direct wiring, with no underlying printed circuit board.

As with Scotto's earlier board designs, the files for the ScottoWing have been released on GitHub under the reciprocal Creative Commons Attribution-NoCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 license; more information is available on Scotto's website.