I was looking to make my sister a macro pad for Christmas and found MisteR_ofcl's stream deck. While it looks amazing the sliders weren't going to be something she would use, so I decided to remix it to have 18 keys instead and use a raspberry pi pico.

V2 As per a suggestion by amorcage I separated the box and top to make soldering easier. As of now this is untested.

BOM

18x cherry brown switches (or switches of your preference)
18x x-key keycaps (relegendable keycaps available from other manufacturers)
1x raspberry pi pico
8x M3 heatset inserts
8x m3x10ish screw
A bunch of Assorted lengths of wire (18 3.5-4 inch and one to connect all the keys to 3.3v)
A micro USB cable

Firmware

I followed this guide on how to flash and put the code onto the pico.
The firmware included has keys using gpio 0-17 each being macro'd to CRTL+ F7-F24 (I didn't know there was any F keys past 12 but windows 10 recognizes them)

Assembly

One heatset insert goes into each of the 8 holes in the base. I used gpio 0-17 for each key wired separately with the bottom pin, and with the top pin being wired to 3.3v. I ended up wiring all the 3.3v pins using bell wire and then one shorter jumper to the pico.

MISC. Thoughts about things to fix

The switches were tight for me but a light filing got them to pop in and actuate freely.
The screw holes were quite snug and the screw heads were also a tight fit.
One thing I didn't touch on was feet to keep it from sliding, I just cut a small piece of rubber that I had and superglued it to the bottom, not the best looking but still functional. I may fix the model later to have spots for rubber feet to go.