Testing the Raspberry Pi 500's new mechanical keyboard

Summary

Instead of a traditional review of a new Pi product, I thought I'd split things up on my blog, and write two separate posts; this one about the Pi 500+'s new mechanical keyboard, and a separate post about hacking in an eGPU on the Pi 500+, for a massive uplift in gaming performance and local LLMs. The Raspberry Pi 500+ was announced today, sells for $200, and adds on the following over what was present in the regular Pi 500: Built-in M.2 NVMe SSD (256GB, 2230-size Pi branded drive) in a 2280-size slot 16 GB LPDDR4x RAM (over the Pi 500's 8) Low-profile RGB-backlit mechanical keyboard with Gateron KS-33 Blue switches I also have a full video covering the Pi 500+ up on YouTube, and you can watch it below, as well: A Mechanical Keyboard Like any modern mechanical keyboard, the Pi 500+'s uses standard keycaps, mounted on top of Gateron KS-33 Low Profile Blue switches. The keycaps feel nice, the larger keys like Space, left Shift, Enter, and Backspace all have extra bracing, and I had no problem pulling keycaps with a few different key pullers. Each key has an individually-controllable RGB LED below, and the keyboard comes preprogrammed with a dozen or so lighting effects. More can be configured in Raspberry Pi's keyboard configuration tools (I used a preview version of it in my testing). The keyboard runs on an RP2040, like many other modern mechanical keyboards, running a Pi fork of the popular QMK firmware. It should be compatible with tools like VIA, for browser-based keyboard configuration, but that will require a slightly different process, and possibly a keyboard firmware update. How does it feel and sound? It's definitely a clickety-clack keyboard, with the blue switches Raspberry Pi chose (note: the plastic inside is grey, not blue). I personally favor quieter key switches, and you can see I was getting about 60 dBa measured 1' away, but as long as you're not in a computer lab full of these things, the noise is tolerable. It feels surprisingly good; I could type...