Starkpad Is a Gorgeous Stream Deck Alternative You Can Build Yourself

The Elgato Stream Deck is incredibly popular among creative types for its practicality, as it gives you a bunch of reconfigurable buttons to launch programs, macros, and shortcuts. Each of those buttons has a full-color LCD screen to indicate its function, so the whole thing is very usable. But if you want a DIY alternative, Starkpad is among the prettiest I’ve seen.

Unlike a Stream Deck, Starkpad doesn’t have individual physical buttons. Rather, it has a touchscreen to display icons with similar functionality. The benefit there is that it can support other functions, such as virtual keyboard and touchpad-like input. As an entirely open-source design, Starkpad is also customizable in whatever way you can imagine.

Of course, it also simply looks really good.

Starkpad’s creator, BlommeJan, chose some interesting hardware to bring this project to life. An Arduino UNO Q runs Linux and a UI built in LVGL. It sends the video signal to the touchscreen. It also sends input events, like keyboard shortcuts, across from the Linux system to the microcontroller on the other side of the board. That is an STM32, but for some reason BlommeJan refers to it as an ATmega4809 — probably just a nomenclature mix-up. The STM32 then sends data back and forth over to a Seeed Studio XIAO RP2040, which actually handles the USB HID communication with the PC.

That seems a bit convoluted, as the STM32 could act as a USB HID directly. But I assume that BlommeJan had a good reason for doing it that way.

In any case, the resulting device seems to work very well. It gives BlommeJan far more flexibility than he’d get from a Stream Deck, but in a similar form factor.