This Raspberry Pi Tablet Features a Chorded Keyboard for Fast Typing

When Apple announced the first iPhone, I (typing on my Samsung BlackJack) confidently stated that it would never succeed. Why? Because nobody would want to do any typing on a touchscreen keyboard. Boy, was I wrong… However, even after switching to touchscreen smartphones like everyone else, I’m still convinced that they offer an inferior typing experience. That’s why I’m so intrigued by Redditor Spacerower’s Compad V2, which is a Raspberry Pi-based tablet that features a chorded keyboard for fast typing.

For the uninitiated, a chorded keyboard is one that can produce all of the typical alphanumeric characters and punctuation with just a handful of keys. Pioneered and popularized by the stenography industry (though stenographic keyboard act a bit differently, based on phonetics), it works by tying each character to a specific key combination, like playing a chord on a piano. In this case, the Compad V2 has a total of just 14 keys in a modified ASETNIOP layout. Eight of those, located on the back of the tablet, are meant for the index, middle, ring, and pinky fingers. The other six, located on the front, are for the thumbs. The six thumb keys are shift, ctrl, alt, left mouse, right mouse, and a layer switch for the numeric keys.

That chorded keyboard alone would make the Compad V2 noteworthy, but it seems to be a well-designed tablet overall. The heart of the device is a Raspberry Pi 4 Model B (4GB model), which Spacerower paired with a 7” touchscreen LCD. In addition to the keys for the chorded keyboard, the tablet also has two Blackberry-style trackballs on the front panel. One functions as the mouse and scroll wheel, while the other replicates a keyboard’s arrow keys.

Power comes from four 2,500mAh lithium batteries, for a total capacity of 10,000mAh—quite a lot for a portable device like this. Even better, Spacerower designed a custom power control system that uses a Raspberry Pi Pico development board to first safely shut down the Raspberry Pi 4 and then to cut off power to it entirely. The Pico also acts as an interface between the keyboard and Raspberry Pi 4, so it isn’t superfluous.

The 3D-printed enclosure, which looks pretty darn stylish, even makes all 40 of the Raspberry Pi 4’s GPIO pins externally accessible.