Projects

building the charybdis

0xC9C3

• 2 min read
building the charybdis

Around a month ago i stumbled upon the ergonomic keyboards world. After doing some research, i fell in love with bastardkb's charybdis. I decided to build one for myself. I ordered the pcb and the case since my Ender 5 Pro died around the same time. Otherwise i would have printed the case myself.

You can find the parts in the shop here. There are two guides. One text based which can be found here and an older video guide which does not seem to use some of the same parts as the text guide. Nonetheless, the video part is still useful. It can be found here. Soldering
the components was a bit tricky but i managed to do it. The last time I soldered anything was around 10 years ago, so it is definitely manageable!

Using via with chrome on arch seems to have some permission issues. The workaround is to open your chrome://device-log and check for any permission related errors. Otherwise via will report that it is unable to connect. Once you have changed the permissions on the hid device, via will work fine (i.e. via chmod 777 /dev/hidraw1). The device number (/dev/hidraw1) will vary depending on where and how many devices you have connected.

"Failed to open the device." VIA reports when having too strict permissions on the hid device
The relevant line from chrome://device-log

For the switches I ordered some cherry mx reds from keychron. I'm not sure how happy I am with them yet. The overall build was very fun and I'm happy with the result. I had an issue where i did not properly solder part of the cable and a part of the keyboard was not working. Everything else did work very well. A kind soul on the bastardkb discord helped me out and i was able to fix it.

The device itself is nice so far. I'm still getting used to the layout and the typing experience. Sometimes I accidentally touch the trackball with the palm of my hand. This might be due to the fact that I'm not used to the experience yet. I'm also very far from my normal wpm, but i'm sure that will improve with time.

If you want to build one yourself, I would recommend it. It's a fun project and the end result is very satisfying. You can improve your soldering skills and learn a lot about the components that go into a keyboard.

If you don't want to order the components from the shop, you can find everything you need in the repository, but I'm sure the people from bastardkb would be happy if you could support them.