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Chrysalis For Linux

5.0/5 1
GPL v3    

Configure Kaleidoscope-powered keyboards without having to compile or flash firmware by relying on this useful little utility. #Kaleidoscope Keyboard  #Kaleidoscope Configurator  #Configure Keyboard  #Kaleidoscope  #Keyboard  #Configurator  

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A kaleidoscope is a strange optical instrument with two or more reflecting surfaces tilted to each other at an angle, that one tube-shaped "toy" from our childhood with changing patterns when it is rotated.

Kaleidoscope is also the name of the firmware for Arduino-powered input devices. Built on top of Arduino, it works with the Arduino IDE and other similar tools, it has a plugin-based architecture, and pretty novice-friendly APIs.

Kaleidoscope-powered keyboards, for example, although weird for most people, are known to be remarkably ergonomic, and highly programmable. However, actually configuring them could pose a bit of a struggle for most day-to-day users.

Here's where Chrysalis comes into play.

Chrysalis is an open-source and cross-platform (works on Linux, Windows, and macOS) graphical configurator for the Kaleidoscope-powered keyboards.

Its purpose? To make the whole process of configuring Kaleidoscope-powered keyboards as effortless as possible. It mostly achieves this via a user-friendly GUI, by storing the configuration on the keyboard itself (in EEPROM).

Another great aspect of Chrysalis is that it doesn't require any other external tools to get the job done. What's more, it doesn't even require you to flash the firmware (Kaleidoscope) yourself.

The app consists of two main sections: the Layout editor, and the Colormap editor.

The Layout editor allows you to edit keymaps, and even allows you to copy one layer to another, as well as to set a default one of your choosing.

As its name suggests, the Colormap editor provides a quick and easy way to edit the colors for each key (per-key LED colormap) for keyboards that have this feature.

The supported Kaleidoscope-keyboards are as follows: the Keyboardio Model01, the Keyboardio Model 100, the Keyboardio Atreus, and the Digma Raise.

The app is capable of configuring other types of keyboards as well such as the ErgoDox Ez, the SOFT/HRUF Splitography, KBDFans, and KBD4x, as long as they run the Kaleidoscope firmware.

In terms of supported OSes, Chrysalis should work on multiple Linux distributions (it's shipped in AppImage format), however, it has only been officially tested on Ubuntu 18.04 LTS. Windows 10 and macOS Mojave (and higher) are also supported.

The fact that Chrysalis can greatly simplify the process of configuring Kaleidoscope-based keyboards is sure to come in handy to those who own such devices.

What's new in Chrysalis 0.13.3:

  • This release fixes a bug in the previous 0.13 series releases that prevented Chrysalis from being able to automatically install firmware downloaded from the official firmware release server.
  • The copy of the Kaleidoscope firmware bundled with this release of Chrysalis has been updated to 0.92.1.
  • Unfortunately, due to a change in Windows codesigning rules, this release of Chrysalis needs to be manually installed on Windows. We're currently hard at work on moving future versions of Chrysalis to your web browser. This will help ensure that you always have the latest version of Chrysalis and that you don't need to install or update custom software in order to configure your keyboard
  • As of this release, we no longer distribute firmware builds for keyboards not made by Keyboardio.
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Chrysalis 0.13.3

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  runs on:
Linux
  filename:
Chrysalis-linux-x64-0.13.3.zip
  1 screenshot:
Chrysalis - The application allows you to configure various aspects of your Kaleidoscope-powered keyboard
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