In-Depth

Hands On with Raspberry Pi 500, a Computer in a Keyboard

• By Tom Fenton
• 01/14/2025

Last month Raspberry announced a major Christmas gift for its users: the Raspberry Pi 500 keyboard computer and the Raspberry Pi Monitor. Not only were they available, but they could be purchased for $90 and $100, respectively.

The Raspberry Pi 500 integrates a Pi computer into a full-sized keyboard, offering a compact computing platform. The heart of the platform is a Pi 5 computer with a powerful quad-core ARM-based CPU and 8GB of RAM. With this computer inside, the Pi 500 should be capable of handling a wide range of tasks.

This announcement excited me, as well as other hobbyists and IT professionals. I had a hunch that they might run out quickly, so I instantly went to PiShop.us and purchased the Pi 500 for $90. With tax and shipping, it came out to a shad over $110. It was delivered two days later.

In this article, I will examine the Pi 500. In another article, I will test its suitability for web browsing and home and office productivity. If it performs as expected, I hope to see if I can use it as a platform for a thin client to connect to VDI virtual machines. Finally, I will install ESXi on it and create an ESXi server in a keyboard! Something that I have wanted to do for years.

The Raspberry Pi Monitor
Before digging into the Pi 500, we should look at the Pi Monitor, which was also announced last month. The monitor was designed and built to work with the Pi 500.

I didn't purchase it, but its specifications look respectable. It is a 15.6-inch full HD (1920 x 1080) IPS panel with a 45% color gamut and an 80° viewing angle. It has a pair of built-in 1.2W speakers. It does not mention how thick it is, but it does appear to be very thin and has a fold-away integrated stand and VESA mounting points. Although it was designed for and can be powered by the Pi 500, it can be used with other PIs as well as other devices.

The monitor consumes 1.5A at 5V and can be powered directly from a Raspberry Pi USB port, but it is limited to a maximum brightness of 60% and a maximum volume of 50% when powered by a Pi.

The Keyboard Form Factor
I need to go off on a tangent and discuss the Pi 500's form factor.

Keyboard computers are not a new idea. In fact, many of the earliest home/gaming computers in the late 1970s and early 1980s were exactly that. Acorn, Timex, Sinclair, Commodore 64, Apple II, and the much-loved Amiga computers used the keyboard form factor.

Back in the late 20th century, I lusted after a Cybernet Elite II Zero Footprint PC. It was a computer in a keyboard that had a Pentium 3 processor, 512MB of RAM, and a 3.5-inch floppy drive on the right side of the keyboard. It was far too expensive for my limited budget, but I always loved the idea of having a computer in the keyboard.

About 10 years ago, I fooled around with the idea of putting an Intel or ASUS stick computer in a keyboard, but it would have involved recreating the bottom of the keyboard, and as this was before the age of 3D printers, I never executed the idea -- and as Intel quit making stick computers in 2021, I most likely never will. In 2023, Pentaform had a computer within a keyboard with an indiegogo funding page that was looking to make a keyboard with an Intel CPU inside it for about $230, but the project was suspended.

It should be noted that this is not the first time Raspberry has shoved a Pi computer in a keyboard; that would be the Pi 400, which was released a few years back. I liked the idea of the Pi 400, but I was doing a lot of work running VMware's ESXi hypervisor on a Pi (you can get my book on that here) but the Pi 400 didn't have the RAM I needed, so I never bought one. Here is how the Pi 500 stacks up against the Pi 400.

As you can see, the Pi 500 has a more powerful CPU and GPU, more RAM, and a built-in power switch. Both devices are the same size (286 x 122 x 23 mm), powered via their USB C connection, and have 1 x USB 2 and 2 x USB 3 ports and GPIO connectors. The Pi 400 is still available and can be purchased for $60.

Unpacking the Pi 500
The device arrived in a FedEx bubble-pack envelope two days after I ordered it. Inside the envelope was a 5" x 12" x 1.25" cardboard box with the Pi 500 in it.

I like that there wasn't unnecessary packaging around the device, and the bubble envelope protected it well enough so that it arrived to me without any damage.

The Pi 500 was made of white plastic and seemed solidly built. The keys seemed about the same size as those on a regular keyboard, but there wasn't a separate keypad or arrow keys. But it does have a power button in the upper right corner.

The key touch was similar to other tactile keyboards that I have, but it didn't have the reassuring clunk of my OMEN mechanical keyboard. To be fair, my OMEN keyboard costs more than the Pi 500.

On the underside of the keyboard were 16 ventilation slits. On the back side of it was a 1Gbit RJ45 Ethernet connector, one USB 2.0 port, two USB 3.0 ports, 40-pin GPIO (for expansion), and an SD card slot. The USB-C port can only be used to power the device.

The device supports 2.4GHz and 5.0GHz 802.11b/g/n/ac WiFi and Bluetooth 5.0 + BLE.

The keyboard is not designed to be opened and serviced, and I didn't try to open mine, but on the Raspberry site, I found a picture of it, half the keyboard removed.

Others, who are more daring than I, have opened it and found it to be pretty much as expected: a Pi 5 inside a keyboard but missing the PCIe 2.0 connector found on the Pi 5. This would allow you to connect an NVME and other devices to it; I will discuss the missing PCIe connector in my next article.

Raspberry Pi OS
Of course, the hardware is only half the story; the Pi 500 also needs an operating system and applications to be useful. Raspberry Pi OS comes preinstalled on the Pi 500 and is the official operating system for Raspberry Pi computers. It is based on Debian Linux but has been modified to meet the needs of Pi devices.

The OS has a built-in desktop environment designed to be easy to use and supports a full suite of home and office applications. Raspberry Pi OS also supports other purposes, including home automation, robotics, and media centers. It comes pre-installed with various software, including the Thonny Python IDE, Scratch, and multimedia tools to support this.

The Raspberry Pi Foundation maintains Raspberry Pi OS and regularly updates it, ensuring it remains compatible with the latest PI hardware and Linux software releases.

Initial Thoughts on the Pi 500
The Pi 500 was pretty much what I expected: A Pi 5 inside a keyboard. Considering what you get for an extra $10 compared to just a Pi 5, it is quite the value as you get a case for the Pi, a heat sink, and a keyboard. The downside is that it is larger and doesn't have the PCIe connector.

So far, I have been impressed with the Pi 500. In my next article, I will explore the hardware (CPU, video, storage, and so on), power it up, and see how it performs some basic home and office tasks.