This "Raspberry Pi 100" Hides a Raspberry Pi Zero Inside an Official Keyboard for Spectrum Emulation
Designed to replicate the core Raspberry Pi 400 concept at a lower cost, this simple build will serve as an eight-bit gaming box.
The Raspberry Pi 400, the first "consumer product" single-board computer in the family, has a little low-cost competition in the form of a custom-built "Raspberry Pi 100" powered by a Raspberry Pi Zero W.
The Raspberry Pi 400 launched in late 2020, packing the guts of a Raspberry Pi 4 Model B — but with a higher clock speed, larger board, and hefty heatsink — into a keyboard chassis. "It's designed to be an object of desire," Raspberry Pi's Eben Upton told us at the time. "The feel of it in your hand, the weight. It just feels like a consumer product, and it's the first time we've ever made anything like that."
The Raspberry Pi 100, though, is far from official. The creation of pseudonymous maker "Bedroom_ninja," it's the same core concept but put together at home, using an off-the-shelf Raspberry Pi Keyboard and a more compact single-board computer as the driving device.
"I had a Raspberry Pi Zero W in the back of a 'drawer' so decided to order a Raspberry Pi Keyboard and make myself a Raspberry Pi 100," the project's creator explains. "It's going to be a dedicated Spectrum emulator," they add, referring to Sinclair's classic eight-bit ZX Spectrum microcomputer — which, like both the official Raspberry Pi 400 and its three-hundred-less reproduction, came built into a keyboard and needed only power and an external display to operate.
"It would have been quite easy to solder some 30AWG wire between the micro-USB pins on the keyboard PCB and USB pads on the [Raspberry Pi] Zero," Bedroom_ninja explains, "but I wanted to still use it as a regular keyboard too so decided against it.
"The original plan was to use a [Raspberry Pi] Zero 2 and a white keyboard for an Amiga emulator but the Zero 2s are sold out everywhere!"
More details are available on the project's Reddit thread.