New keyboards for Portugal, Norway, Sweden, and Denmark
It feels like just yesterday that we released the Raspberry Pi keyboard and hub to the world. Well, it turns out it’s been more than a year, and time really has flown for the next stage of this project, which brings four new language/country options: Portugal, Norway, Sweden, and Denmark. They’re available to buy now from Raspberry Pi Approved Resellers.
Raspberry Pi keyboards
The keyboard and hub has been a great success, with many users adopting our Raspberry Pi red and white colour scheme for their setup. As well as this satisfying uptake of the keyboard on its own, we’ve also sold tens of thousands of Raspberry Pi Desktop Kits which include a keyboard, alongside the official mouse, Beginners Guide and, of course, a Raspberry Pi.
We made the black and grey set up for users who own a black and grey Raspberry Pi case, but, with four out of five people choosing the red and white variant, it just goes to show what a bit of company branding can do for business!
We’ve found that the US keyboard is the most popular model, with over half our users choosing that option. As a Brit, I prefer the chunkier Enter key of the UK keyboard.
New variants
There is always a demand to support more users with keyboards to match their country and language so, as a second phase, we are announcing keyboards for the following countries:
- Portugal
- Norway
- Sweden
- Denmark
These new keyboards are available now in red and white, with black and grey options coming soon. They are just print changes from previously released variants, but the devil proved to be in the detail.
For example, we hoped early on that the Portuguese keyboard would suit users in Brazil too, but we learned that Brazilian and European Portuguese keyboard layouts are quite different. Given the differences between UK and US keyboard layouts, this really shouldn’t have surprised us!
There is a very subtle difference between the Norway and Denmark keyboards. I wonder if anyone can spot it?
Norway 
Denmark
We also discovered that a Finnish keyboard layout exists, but I couldn’t identify any differences between it and the Sweden keyboard. While I don’t speak Finnish, I do speak Swedish – an awesome language that everyone should learn – so I came to these investigations with a bit of relevant knowledge. I found that there are very small changes between different manufacturers, but no consistent differences between Finnish and Swedish keyboards, and ultimately I was guided by what Raspberry Pi OS expects as the correct function for these keyboards. I do hope I am right about these two keyboards being the same… I expect I’ll soon find out in the comments!
We know that many users are waiting for a Japan keyboard variant. We hardly ever talk about new products before they are released, but we’re breaking our rule, in this case, to let you know that we hope to have some news about this very soon – so watch this space!
I’d like to give special thanks to Sherman Liu of Gembird for the new key matrix design, and Craig Wightman of Kinneir Dufort for his patience in designing all the key print revisions.
Happy coding, folks!
44 comments
Timo Vaahtera
We use swedish layout in Finland. Also in Estonia is almost same and can be covered with few alter native print on caps. Article of QWERTY on Wikipedia covers these.
George Parker
Thank you and best wishes from England!
Anders
I use these keyboards and I will just add that having USB socket on the keyboard to plug in the mouse, freeing up a USB socket on the PI is very useful, especially on a Pi Zero.
Bernhard Strobl
Will you guys ever consider releasing a Keyboard with a Pi integrated like in the old days of micro computing? Would offer excellent protection for the Pi and less stuff hanging around the desk :)
Timothy T.
I’d love for this to happen. And have been searching for a retro system in my area for months to turn into such a project piece. If Pi had a keyboard case available, I’d likely order one for all but one of my Raspberry Pis
Mikael Bonnier
People have hacked Pi 3+ Model A and Pi Zero W into these keyboards, but it would have been better if they were prepared for small Pi models.
Jens Holm
The Norwegian and the danish keyboards differs only in the placement of the Æ & Ø..
A classic joke is to swap keyboard layout for a collegue..
Martin Bonner
Æ Ø is probably the most important difference, but the keys top right and bottom left are different too.
Mikael Bonnier
Top right (left of Backspace) is different too. I think Denmark should switch to the Norwegian layout, and then Sweden and Finland should also switch to the Norwegian layout also, except that they should have Ä and Ö instead of Æ and Ø. I think the Norwegian layout is better for programming since it makes characters used in C-like programming languages easier to type. BTW a feature with Æ and Ø is that you can have Ǽ and Ǿ, but that doesn’t work for Ä and Ö. BTW I’m Swedish, but now I use the UK/GB keyboard, and can type Swedish/Finnish and Danish/Norwegian characters using the default layout for that keyboard.
Kari Salovaara
When Raspberry Pi Desktop Kits with Finnish/Swedish keyboard will be available?
Thanks in advance, Kari
Ed
I’m sure you’re not malicious about it but the “Buy Now” button uses a javascript geolocation library and gets, rightfully, blocked in my browser. Unfortunately there is no accessible alternative so I have no idea where it should lead. To your resellers list?
I’m in NL. I checked resellers Pimoroni (UK) and Kiwi (NL) manually and the former doesn’t sell the EU variant of the kit, the latter doesn’t sell any official kit at all. While a special NL keyboard would be great, a US one will be just fine for most people in the NL *iff* it supports a US International layout with euro-key. It’s a pity that the euro symbol is not on the US keyboard.
So, I “can’t” a buy a desktop kit because I don’t know where to buy the EU variant (and it has no euro symbol), the UK/US variants have the wrong plugs, and the other ones have basic layouts we do not use, like DE which is qwertz instead of qwerty.
Alex Bate
Hi Ed,
Thank you for pointing this out. I have informed the team. If you scroll to the bottom of this page, are you able to see the model and country options in the dropdown boxes? That should allow you to pick the right keyboard layout and find your nearest Approved Reseller. Let me know if it works for you.
fdufnews
If it is the euro symbol that is problematic for you, you can access it on any keyboard using the compose key which is a very handy trick under Linux.
You can enter euro symbol by pressing compose+E+=.
Read this: https://appuals.com/how-to-define-a-system-wide-compose-key-in-linux/
fdufnews
As a complement, I would say that in the link I gave above it is proposed to use the scroll lock key which is in my opinion anti-ergonomic because it is located at the top of the keyboard I would suggest using alt-right or control-right keys
Nacho
When we’ll be spanish keyboard.?.
Alex Bate
We already sell a Spanish keyboard. You’ll find it on our products page. Just select the Spanish model and your location and you’ll find your nearest reseller.
Hussain
Still waiting for the Arabic Layout ?
Lenard Gunda
You should just label the Swedish version of the keyboard as Swedish/Finnish.
Most notebook and keyboard manufacturers do it like this – they have a single product for both Sweden and Finland.
For example Lenovo’s notebook models share the same model number for Sweden and Finland. They use the exact same keyboard.
(To be precise, sometimes keyboard manufacturers also might have a “Nordic” version, which is then used for Finland, Sweden, Norway and Denmark, which is just a way to put all the symbols onto one keyboard. Steelseries sells keyboards like this.)
jefferson de Almeida Ramos
name Brazil in the story … we love you too
Herman
Hello, good news for the RPi-users in these countries. The Belgians have their own AZERTY-layout, so will there be a RPi-keyboard for them also in the near future? I now have to use a French RPi-keyboard which uses the same AZERTY-layout for letters but is different for numbers and other characters than the Belgian keyboards.
Roland Ronquist
Sweden and Finland share a common history and Swedish is still an official language of Finland. Accordingly we do have the same keyboard layout, but sometimes marketing decides to sell them with different markings/branding on the packaging in the respective countries. To even more confuse us, sometimes linux distributions provide a Swedish layout with a pipe character | that is from some far corner of the Unicode character set, which happen to look like | but with a different code than your normal pipe character. Accordingly the Swedish layout will then be pretty useless in those cases, if you do enter shell commands frequently.
João Alves
Amazing news!
Portuguese keyboard! At last I can type my name!
Tamas Domjan
Would be nice to have Hungarian layout as well ;-)
Olivier Poulin
I would love to see a french canadian layout. It’s mostly a UK layout with a few modification. Could even possibly make an hybrid UK/french canadian layout by adding a second color for our key layout differences.
I’m always decinding not to buy the keyboard because of this.
Thanks.
Richard Molyneux
As noted above, the USB hub would be perfect for Pi Zero, so why no red micro to micro cable available? Also, with the Pi making a great media player, why no media FN symbols on F3 to F9; play/pause, forward, rewind, etc.?
andrum99
Probably because you’re not really meant to have a micro-USB socket on one end of a cable. If you need to do that connection, there is a handy shim available – see https://shop.pimoroni.com/products/usb-to-microusb-otg-converter-shim
andrum99
Sorry – not socket, but a cable with micro-USB plugs on both ends is also out-of-spec.
jorge santos
PORTUGAL is thankful ?.
Mikael Bonnier
You can type the Insert key by typing Fn+Delete on the official Raspberry Pi Keyboard. I miss these keys: Pause, Super R (Right Windows key), Menu, Enter (on the num pad). Shift+F10 is an alternative to Menu, but doesn’t send the Menu scan code. I think there should be combinations with Fn that makes it possible to generate all scan codes on a pc105 keyboard plus multimedia keys.
It would be a wish that the next version of the official Raspberry Pi Keyboard could generate all scan codes for pc105 even if it is the US version (i.e. pc104), because then I think Fn+Z should generate the key left of Z on a pc105 keyboard. Fn+B could be Pause key ─ it cannot be Fn+P because that’s already – (minus) on the numeric keypad. Fn by itself doesn’t send a scan code. It would also be good if multimedia keys were supported using e.g. Fn+F3 to Fn+F9.
Pauli Isoaho
I hate cables so any recommedations for bluetooth keyboard and mouse for RPi?
Pax
Why does no Danish, Norwegian, Swedish or Portuguese resellers have the official Raspberry Pi Mouse?
jorge santos
In Portugal we have the mouse available.
https://mauser.pt/catalog/product_info.php?products_id=047-2618
Tom MacFarlane
I love the combo of usb hub and short cabled mouse. If you added backlit keyboard it would be would be an instant design classic, . If you make one I’ll upgrade the keyboards I already have. I went conventional black to use on other computers as well as my RPi’s, this keyboard is too good not to share with other lesser computers like MacBook and PCs
Please consider a backlit, optional on/off switch for those users worried about extra power being used
Bonz
Could a Raspberry Pi Wireless Bluetooth Keyboard be possible, like the keyboards with Kano kits? ?
Joakim Uppsäll-Sjögren
Wy do you still use a micro-USB for connecting to the computer? instead of a USB-c port and then use a USB-c to a USB-A cable until you get more USB-C conetors on your Pis :-)
Esbeeb
The Raspberry Button, (Super key) is sweet.
Bayesian Bouffant, FCD
When will the Klingon version be available? vjIjatlh!
Ebubekir
Raspberry Pi has many users in Turkey. If you make a Turkish language keyboard has Turkish letters (ü,i,ç,ğ,ş,ö) we will so glad. Thanks.
Nick
The US keyboard layout is more spread around the world, so it’s no surprise that people are more accustomed with it. I also like a big Enter key, but I refuse to flip @#` and the other keys just for the big Enter key, plus I have no use for the pound sign. :) That’s why I end up buying the US layout version.
https://blog.wooting.nl/wp-content/uploads/2016/07/US-vs-UK-layout.png
nafanz
Please make a keyboard with Russian layout.
Þór
Hi there!
If you need assistance to map the Icelandic keyboard, I’m happy to help! :) Just contact me at the address registered with this entry.
Lionel
Any chance for a Swiss French keyboard ?
Alex
No, but a Swiss layout would be fine and please users from Switzerland, Liechtenstein and Luxembourg. Such a huge market!
FYI, Swiss french and Swiss german is the same keyboard layout. Don’t ask for a layout with an even small market than needed!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/QWERTZ#Switzerland_(German,_French,_Italian,_Romansh),_Liechtenstein,_Luxembourg
Magg3rn
When will the Norwegian variant be released, I am thinking of using it as a laptop on the go since screens is always available
Comments are closed