Welcome, RWTH Ersties: Your Stream Deck Neo Starter Guide

If you are reading this, you just picked up a Stream Deck Neo from the Fachschaft Elektrotechnik welcome event at RWTH Aachen. It is yours to keep. This guide covers the two things worth doing with it: getting it running on your laptop in about five minutes, and if you want to go further building something for it and publishing it on Elgato Marketplace, where anyone can install it.

Stream Deck Neo is a small controller that sits next to your keyboard. It has eight LCD keys, two Touch Points for flipping between pages of keys, and an LCD Infobar in the middle that can show the time, your CPU load, or the next thing in your calendar.

Every key is its own screen, so you always see what it does, and you decide what that is. A key can open an app, run a command, mute your mic, or fire off a chain of all three. It connects over USB-C and is powered by that connection, there is no battery and no power adapter.

Stream Deck came out of live streaming in 2017 and has evolved since. On a student desk it is a shortcut box for software you already use.

You need: a laptop or desktop running Windows 11 or later, or macOS 13 or later, and a free USB-C port. Running Linux? There is a question about that at the end of this article.

1. Install the Stream Deck software

Download Stream Deck for Windows or macOS. It is free, and it is the part that turns the keys into whatever you need.

2. Plug it in

One USB-C cable into your machine. The keys light up and the software finds the device on its own. There is no pairing step and no account to create.

3. Load your RWTH FSET profile

You do not have to start from a blank device. We put together a profile for this activation, so the keys arrive already useful.

Download the RWTH FSET profile — then double-click the file and Stream Deck installs it.

Everything in this guide is on it: the SDK docs, the plugin samples, the Maker Discord, Marketplace, and where to get help. One press each, straight from the device.It is a starting point, not a fixed layout. Every key on it can be changed, renamed or thrown away.

4. Make it your own

Adding your own keys works the same way. The right-hand panel of the software lists everything a key can do. Open a website, launch an application, run a hotkey, start a timer, execute a command. Drag one onto a key, set it up in the panel below, and press the key. That is the whole model.For a full walkthrough, see the Stream Deck Quick Start Guide.

Eight keys sounds like few. It is not, for two reasons: the Touch Points flip you between pages, and profiles can switch automatically whenwhen you switch applications.Some starting points for an engineering degree:

• Coding. Build, run, test, commit. A Multi-Action chains several steps onto one key, so save, build, run becomes one press instead of three.
• Lectures. Start a recording, open the slides, drop a timestamp on the part you did not follow, start a countdown before the next block.
• Lab and project work. Trigger a measurement script, open the log, jump between the tools on a shared machine.
• Group calls. Mute, camera, share screen, leave without hunting for the right window first.

Once you have a layout that works for one of these, you have made a profile. Which is where the interesting part starts.

A profile is a saved key layout: which actions sit on which keys, with their icons and settings. You can have one for your editor, one for lectures, one for calls, and have Stream Deck switch between them automatically based on the app in focus.

You already have one: the RWTH profile from step 3. Open it in the software and you can see exactly how it is put together. Which action sits on which key, what each one is configured to do. Taking apart a profile that already works is the fastest way to understand what you can build.

Profiles export to a single file, which can be shared with friends or classmates. That file can also be published on Elgato Marketplace, which means a layout you built for a specific piece of lab software or a specific toolchain can be installed by anyone who uses the same thing.

This is the lowest-effort route from using Stream Deck to publishing for it. It needs no code at all.

Remember, it is not just about Stream Deck Neo, but a whole Stream Deck Ecosystem on multiple devices. Best to check out Explore Stream Deck for an quick overview before moving on discovering what you can do with the SDK.

Everything Stream Deck does beyond its built-in actions, it does through plugins and the SDK for writing them is public and documented at docs.elgato.com/sdk. One thing to be upfront about: plugins are written in TypeScript, running on Node.js, not in the C and C++ you are about to spend your first semester with. If you have never touched either, the gap is a weekend rather than a semester, and TypeScript is what most of the tooling around you is written in anyway.Getting to a working plugin is short:

1. Install Node.js, version 24 or higher.
2. Install the Stream Deck CLI from npm.
3. Run streamdeck create. The wizard scaffolds a complete, working plugin.
4. Run npm run watch and edit. Changes hot-reload onto the device while it is plugged in.

From there, the plugin samples on GitHub are complete working plugins you can clone, run, and take apart. These are some examples to help get started. The docs will be important as you dive deeper.

Elgato Marketplace is where Stream Deck plugins, profiles, icons, screensavers and soundboards are distributed. Publishing to it is what makes you an Elgato Maker.The setup is three steps, done once:

1. Go to the Maker Console and create your organization.
2. Sign the Maker Agreement.
3. Submit your product. Everything goes through a review before it is listed.

You set your own price, and you can publish for free. Paid products run on a 70/30 split. You keep 70%, Elgato takes 30% with payouts handled through Stripe Connect. Free products have no country restrictions.The full details are in the Maker documentation.

• Maker Discord — the people who build plugins and profiles for a living, answering questions. The fastest place to get unstuck.
• Maker documentation — everything you can publish and how submission works.
• Maker newsletter — SDK releases, form news, and what other makers have shipped. We are planning something specifically for student makers; the newsletter is where it will be announced first.