I was instantly drawn to this little cutie as soon as I read this article – a Pi Zero powered tiny handheld with a super-crisp Sharp 400 x 240 2.7″ LCD, LoRa module & 56-button keypad… as soon it was announced in Sep 2022 on their crowd-supply page that they’d fixed their CE-marking issues and it was available in Europe I placed my order... and waited… and waited…
Aware of the inherent risk that comes with crowd-funded projects I was sceptical that this one would actually deliver any hardware; I’ve spent a considerable amount of money over the years on things that were never delivered. So after a couple of predictable “sorry guys, we’ve been delayed” updates we were already at Jun 2023… Then came Apr 2024’s “Almost ready to ship, nearly there!”. And then, nothing… I’d written it off as another “never to be seen” crowd-funder, but then…
…in Dec 2025 – out of the blue, an update: “all the boards are with Mouser for shipping” – I was not expecting that! And by mid-December I finally had a SharPiKeebo in my hands 😉
Excitement quickly evaporated though when I tried to get it up & running; plugging in a LiPo battery and a Pi Zero it quickly became apparent that there was no power to the Pi ;-( The photos on the Crowd Supply and Hackster.io pages showed the Pi Zero with a standard header plugged component-side down to the SharPiKeebo’s PCB but it quickly became clear that the orientation had to be reversed – unusually the Pi needed a header that was soldered to the underneath of its PCB… so, new (bare) Pi was ordered and out came the soldering iron…
Now the power was fixed the next issue was that the project was now so old that the software drivers for the LCD display don’t work on later versions of Raspberry Pi’s OS (bullseye/trixie). I found a couple of newer Sharp DRM drivers but couldn’t get them to compile (I’m not a software engineer!) but luckily clever people managed to get the code here to work with a few config tweaks to match the SharPiKeebo’s wiring.
The keyboard is still missing in action though… it’s output is via the USB-C connector and connecting that directly to the Pi (with the supplied USB-C/micro USB cable) causes it to power off 😦
The “official” sharpikeebo repo at Github is several years out of date. The schematics etc. don’t match the hardware as supplied. There are pads for pogo pins on the SharPiKeebo that line up with the USB D+/D- pads on the underside of the Pi…. but the SharPiKeebo’s pads are not tracked anywhere! Using these pins/pads on the Pi with USB signals is known to interfere with wifi on the Zero 2W, attaching flying leads to these is going to be tricky to say the least.
So, in summary – still a cute looking device with crisp display but massively flawed. It needs some significant engineering effort to make it usable in the way it was advertised…
Outstanding issues:
- No electrical connection between keypad and Pi – using a direct cable (or via a USB hub) shorts/disconnects the Pi’s power – see https://github.com/ccadic/sharpikeebo/issues/9
- Un-plugging the LiPo charging lead turns off the 5V to the Pi
- Github repo with hardware/software details out-of-date – last updated 3 or 4 years ago – see https://github.com/ccadic/sharpikeebo/issues/12
Room 7609 