The Keystone is a compact, custom-made shortcut panel. Ten physical push buttons arranged in two rows around a wide e-ink display, housed in an aluminum enclosure roughly the size of a large smart phone. The display shows the currently active application and labels each button accordingly. Switch to Photoshop and the labels change. Open a text editor and they change again. Press a button and the corresponding keystroke fires in the active window nearly instantly. The whole thing connects to your computer via a single USB cable.
The design philosophy is deliberately simple and repairable. Every component is off the shelf. The device can be disassembled within a few minutes and reassembled in the same amount of time. If something breaks, parts can simply be exchanged. Most connections are Dupont pins, so components can be swapped out without tools — only the buttons and the status LED required soldering. The configuration lives in a single JSON file that contains everything needed to make the Keystone your own.
Under the hood it runs on a Raspberry Pi Zero. The e-ink screen is driven over SPI, the buttons over GPIO, and the USB connection presents itself to Windows as a composite device: a serial port for receiving window data and a HID keyboard for sending keystrokes. A small Python script runs silently in the background on the host computer, watches which window is in focus, matches it against the configuration file, and sends the relevant button labels to the panel. No cloud, no subscription, no driver installation necessary.
Nothing about this device is proprietary — it is fully open source. That mattered most to me. Most hardware today is the opposite: sealed, soldered, dependent on software that gets abandoned, designed to be replaced rather than repaired. Sure, ordering a Stream Deck is probably easier. But the Keystone is an argument that the tools you rely on daily can be understandable, maintainable, and fully yours.
