I wanted to make something that people could reasonably build at home, at a much lower cost than an off-the-shelf Stream Deck. There was a lot of engineering that went into making the Stream Deck, and I’m going to have to simplify. The #1 rule for this is cheap. The buttons on top allow the LCD to shine through for the backlight icons, and push down on a touch matrix to trigger button presses. Adafruit did an interesting breakdown on stream, but it’s essentially a mini computer using an Atmel ARM926EJ-S driving a 480×272 resolution LCD. The Stream Deck itself is a fantastic piece of tech. It could be used as a hotkey board for any program. Fortunately I think I can make something that replicates the basic functionality for a fraction of that price: what I’m calling a “Stream Cheap”.Īlthough I’m focusing on using this as a replacement for a Stream Deck, at heart this is really a custom macro keyboard. Unfortunately the Stream Deck is out of my price range, at a whopping $149.99 retail.

By configuring the bundled software, users can set button icons and macros to control your casting software, send messages in the stream chat, launch programs, and much much more. The Stream Deck is a small device with 15 buttons, each of which has its own customizable RGB icon. I’ve been doing a little streaming on Twitch, and a lot of streamers I follow have something called an Elgato Stream Deck.

Adafruit trinket 5v keyboard