Open-source RGB lighting control for keyboards, fans, etc
gitlab.com
gitlab.com
We put windows in our boring grey computer cases and bought blue LEDs for 2 EUR a piece to light up the internals. As LEDs were so expensive we often opted to use CCFL tubes. We put electroluminescent wire everywhere, even into keyboards. We built our own fan controllers from scratch to fit into a 3.5" slot. People payed 200 EUR for PC cases from LIAN LI and Cooler Master just to mod the shit out of them. Watercooling just became a thing and it was hugely expensive, the PC cases didn't have a place for the radiators so you had to get creative with your power tools. We went to LAN parties with our awesome machines, we organized collective orders in our case modding forums to buy cheap LEDs from china. We were amazed by the latest products, like LED fans that flashed the light in synchronization with the fan RPM like a zoetrope, so it appeared to stand still.
We couldn't even dream of a keyboard with individually RGB keys back then and now you get RGB in everything without even wanting it. Mass production has taken over and all the magic is gone. You just buy it and yeah it looks cool, but whats the fun in that if every PC looks the same - thats exactly what we didn't want, we wanted to be different.
Fun times though!
The one that left the biggest impression on me had backlit tubes on either side of the case front with bubbles flowing up, and the owner was demonstrating the Compiz cube and wobbly windows. I was smitten!
Incidentally, I also got my first experience with Linux elitism when somebody asked me what my favorite editor was and I told him Abiword. He told me "Real men use emacs." Still a little embarrassed about that, but as a middle school kid I didn't have much need to know the difference between a word processor and an editor. In hindsight I'm sure they thought it was pretty cute/funny for a kid to visit a college event.
I even currently run one of these: https://koolance.com/pc2-601bw-liquid-cooling-system-black - I've had to replace the pump this last week. It didn't die, but the plastic got brittle and cracked. I ran it, without flushes, adding tap water when low, for about 18 years. No corrosion, all liquid looked great! I modified the old Swiftech WB to mount to my 3930K, overclocked to 4.5GHz and am typing on that system right now! If you're curious, it tops out at about 75*C at ~150W CPU power usage.
I still have a CCFL (and my $5 blue LED to replace the power light), and have been thinking of incorporating it into my next build. I plan to build a sleeper system using a case from the 90's, but fully watercooled and upgraded (along with an ESP32-powered fan control/thermal monitoring system I'm coding up now - this is where the magic still is in 2021 IMO)
I also did cut a window into a PC with a dremel. Those cases are quite thick and hard to cut! I totally don't miss hauling that big PC case and a 17 (or 19?) inch CRT to a friends place to LAN. Was really fun, though.
Was that casemodder.de by any chance?
I spent quite a lot of time there back in my teenage days.
Man, this brings back memories... I remember talking to someone from casemodder.de on ICQ trying to partner with them but we got into some silly argument so it never happened.
Do you remember case-gallery, pc-max and the modding toplists? Its very fun to look those pages up on archive.org, those where the days :D
bit-tech.net is another site I remember (which is still around, but a lot less active in the modding sections than it was)
Nowadays, where do you share? Reddit? Twitter? Facebook? It's so public and you have to compete with people who spend 3k on their PC, 1k on a keyboard, nice periphery, table, monitors and room LED lighting.
I'm sure there is more to it, but that's at least how I feel about it now.
Edit: Oh wow, thanks, didn't know bit-tech is still active!
I had to hunt around for the correct software to disable the stuff. Little did I know that this project existed at the time :)
If you don't touchtype and need to see your keyboard to type effectively then being able to configure the color and intensity is nice, but for me all the intensity I need is 0. At night I'll just have some gentle ambient light in my room.
I use an expensive Moonlander keyboard that comes with RGB lighting and I tried to give it a fair chance but I always end up finding it distracting and useless.
I have a red led mechanical keyboard and that one doesn't bug me at all. But the white ones do.
But if I want to, I can go all unicorn... - or turn everything off.
In terms of the "why" for this kind of thing, I guess if I'm going to be staring at a computer screen and computer all day, I want it to look interesting. The P3 case is open with a large glass plate on the front (look it up), and I've got it mounted directly on my wall. It does nothing for my computer's performance, but it makes my time at the computer more pleasant.
AMD ships them standard with their Ryzen processors, I guess the market for enthusiast range parts has decided that we want RGB hardware.
Personally I think case aesthetics peaked around the Antec P180 which looked like brushed metal fridge and was one of the first cases to care about sound isolation. No window panel, so nobody cares how much of a mess my wiring is, and I can buy the RAM that's on sale instead of the one with color coordinated heatspreaders.
But if other people are into that, power to them.
Someday I'd like to do a "desktop literally built into the desk top" build and ditch the suspended computer mount completely, assuming I still even want to have a full desktop computer 10 years from now.
Then again, I also gave up on desktops roughly 8 years ago. If it isn't my laptop it is a NUC or similar small form factor thing that can be mounted on the back of the monitor or otherwise hidden away.
For 7 years my desktop has been literally just a motherboard sitting on a cut-up yoga mat on my bookshelf. [1] The SSDs are piled next to it. My work PC is zip-tied to a milk crate. Don't let people fool you, you can be pretty creative with your definition of "case".
I used to just have it directly on the wood, which was fine too, but then I put it on top of an upside-down, powder-coated-metal IKEA drawer thing (so I could put the power supply underneath for more shelf space). My fiancee was worried it might get scratched and conduct at some point, so we added the yoga mat.
Not at all, it's plastic!
It took me at least 5 years to get a new case, much to my wife's annoyance.
It was fine. Swapping SSDs was easy. >.<
The Sun "pizza box" computer was like that.[1]
You could just bolt a 1U rackmount server to the underside of a desktop. Or get a desk that's 1.75 inches thick, cut a hole of the appropriate size, and recess the server into it. There are lots of under the desk computer mounts, but I haven't seen a recessed one.
Except without the glass top. Or perhaps glass with a very dark tint so that it looks black, but with sufficiently bright internal lighting you can see through it.
The easier and more likely version would be to make the computer fit in a normal desk drawer. Prefer that to a 1U on account of fan size as another commenter mentioned, but being off to one side instead of the whole desk surface has the benefit of not making the whole desk chunkier.
The other link is showing this desk and another commercialized version inspired by it.
That's still my case, but it's huge and I don't need that space anymore.
Generally speaking "sound isolation" means reducing where sound can escape from the case, and putting some noise absorbing foam where you can to dampen the noise.
The counterproductive part is that having a lot of airflow would be the opposite of "sound isolating" -- anywhere air flows freely sound does as well. So by definition a sound isolating case has poor airflow. Poor airflow could require you to run your fans at higher RPMs to compensate, which is then introducing more noise than you would have had with a more open case that could run low RPM fans.
Gamers Nexus did a good piece on this https://www.gamersnexus.net/guides/3391-airflow-vs-silent-ca...
(as he points out, there are still reasons to prefer sound isolating cases, it's just not as much of a clear win as it might sound at first)
DIY Perks did that.
Invisible PC - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Perqf0dOGLk
Invisible monitor - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_E0mNSMBmFQ
Only for the ryzen 7 and the r9 _900 cpus. The low end ones come with a basic black cooler and the high end come with nothing.
I was used to always getting an aftermarket cooler for previous Intel builds to replace the stock one with the whiny little fan, but the included Ryzen 7 cooler is comparatively great (unnecessary bling aside).
The only downsides I encountered were color matching among different components, it was a bit tedious. The other was the control software (gigabyte fusion 2.0) was very touchy, at one point I had to do a hard reset and wait for the caps to drain before I could get the LEDs functional again.
Edit: typo
This app is great but the tales of bricked RGB hardware during development are a little concerning.
I'd get that
[1] https://gitlab.com/CalcProgrammer1/OpenRGB/-/wikis/Supported...
Me neither. Today it's hard to find TVs that are just TVs and not smart TVs and similar thing is happening in the PC builders ecosystem. Built a new desktop computer recently, and had to spend more time searching for things that don't have RGB things in them, seems most components nowadays have some sort of RGB lights in them, even when it's completely not needed.
Back in my day, people used to buy strips of RGB lights to add to their setup, so us normal, non-RGB people could still buy the same components. Today, it's a lot harder to find stock CPU fans that don't ship with RGB lights...
Why would you prefer non-smart TVs?
As a rule of thumb, don't trust any software developed by white goods manufacturers and connect it to the internet since it has most likely been developed in a rush and on a tight budget (HW margins are razor thin and good devs with security know-how are expensive) and is most likely a house of cards of outdated kernels, libs and services that are full of CVEs which might never get updated.
But overall it’s okay. The remote is simple, the main apps are fine and the overall ecosystem integration is okay
This user behavior has been guided by two past trends: A. in the transition from analog to digital TV signals many display makers separated the TV receiver function; B. by the time makers integrated VCRs the world had moved on to DVD which made the integrated VCR a waste product that could not be disposed of without refreshing the display.
Are the signal generation components of "Smart TVs" similar to the analog TV tuner, slow to change and nearly always needed, or are they like the VCR which was integrated right at a signal generator change?
On the other hand, I suspect that displays are adding more general computing for the purpose of scaling, color representations, decryption, etc even without the components that provide "smart" functions. As a result scaling them to include smart functions as software functions is low hanging fruit. I wonder if display computation architecture is common enough to support a user/hobbyist controlled OS.
http://linuxgizmos.com/linux-continues-advance-in-smart-tv-m...
The one smart tv I own is crazy annoying. I used Plex, Netflix and YouTube on it, and about once a week either the core software or one of them would get updated, constantly nagging me with "update available, install now?" prompt, and then blocking usage for several minutes when I finally relented and said yes. That TV now has a Chromecast and all built in network connections disabled.
I won't even get into the adware/malware nonsense others have already talked about.
Having the "smart" features decoupled from the screen itself has allowed me to keep my perfectly fine (to me) 1080p screen for all these years while still enjoying the latest-and-greatest "smart" features.
I use OpenRGB to disable all lights, or sometimes I’m in the Cyberpunk 2077 mood and make it yellow.
I’m curious that people want to pay more to get less.
Actually a fairly old adage when it comes to lots of things, not just TVs. Sometimes it's for creativity (limiting yourself to only using specific set of hardware for music production) and sometimes for better user experience (like in industrial design, Dieter Rams' (Braun) simpler radios with less functionality is a famous example, ~1960). Dieter Ram also had a large influence on design in general, and states one of the principles for "Good design" is "Good design is minimal – Less is more. Simple as possible but not simpler. Good design elevates the essential functions of a product."
Because of the additional friction involved I do not agree with the just turn off rgb mentality many in the hobby push
Anyway, certainly the whole thing has gotten bit out of control. An optional RGB header on a motherboard is one thing, but on the sound card? Total madness: https://youtu.be/0NMlWg-7Crg?t=29
It takes 3-5 seconds to turn on, then another 10-20 seconds to react to input from the remote (at which time it will rapidly replay all input provided that it didn't react to in this time, sometimes turning itself back off for no reason).
All of the "apps" are barely responsive and crash regularly. Hulu, particularly will crash at the end of every episode.
I've tried factory resets, and was hopeful about an open source mod until I discovered my firmware version is "unpatchable" as of yet.
The Internet of Shit is alive and well.
But! You can use OpenRGB to turn off the lights, so this article still may be relevant for you :)
If it makes people happy, I'm all for it. I couldn't be bothered to figure out how to actually turn the lights in the CPU-fan off though (they are on by default), so there is a very colourful and pointless light show going on within my completely black and opaque computer case.
I might try to embrace it to look nice, but I will probably just end up turning them all off, despite having a window on the case.
https://gitlab.com/CalcProgrammer1/KeyboardVisualizer
I had a great time pointing my camera at my computer for a meeting, and letting everyone realize their voice was controlling the RGB (with a slight delay for zoom of course).
I'm even thinking about making my own visualizer to do things like show me my kubernetes cluster health on my RGB :)
One thing to note, the corsair RGB fans and strips can be tricky - you have to tell it how many LEDs are on each strip manually, and otherwise it will just look all black and won't warn you. That was a couple hours of debugging there!
The worst part was the new drivers being loaded. Searching driver names led me to multiple exploit POCs allowing all kinds of nastiness. Some of them were patched but overall I got the feeling that RGB etc driver quality is awful.
I wish HW manufactures would at least use static colours as a default choice.
People also seem to treat their IT equipment far more as fashion accessories these days - or at least expect technology to fit into their ideas of aesthetics. If you think multi-coloured, cleverly fading LEDs look pretty then you're well in. If you don't then at least it's all pretty easy to switch off.
Because we don't know how to use the feature yet.
But you can connect something like a CPU trigger to a led, so use 3 keys with 3 colors for CPU%, RAM%, SWAP%, then one blinking for disk IO, network IO and you get something very useful!!
For a full keyboard, you could have predictive input for the other as a typing assistant (ex: after pressing t,y put r in a strong green, e in a lighter green, p in a strong red, i,n,g in a lighter red : so typing and tyre are shown as 2 completions, with tyre less likely unless you work in mediterranean history and care about ancient cities)
I programmed one of my keyboard to be modal, and use the lighting as an indicator of which mode I'm in. Sort of like vim's status bar. It's pretty handy.
Exactly this! I don't want to waste screen space or CPU time to fancy widgets, but having a few leds that blink too much when my system does too many things is very handy. It's like in the old days of HDD leds: it didn't intrude, but I quickly knew what was going on if I looked at it. And blinking things have a tendency to catch your attention, so it removes the "monitoring" problem too (because, when do you know it's time to check htop?)
Linux LED triggers are very handy to do just than.
Installing openrgb is infinitely easier than wiring up LEDs inside fans imo.
Personally I don't bother, I go after sound-proofing in my builds instead, but my partner, who isn't particularly into computers, is actually quite a fan of the RGB stuff so her computer will be notably more lary.
However, here we are, with people buying RGB fans and having their desktops on the desk taking up space and making more noise (because they are closer)... I don't get it either.
I know of a few more that are not on the website tho! I have seen led strips on closets (ala fridge style) that light up when you open them (With something like [5]). I have also seen the opposite of the LEDs on the ceiling, on the floor. Something like [6] but in the hall is pretty cool. When you finish watching that movie/tv show and go to sleep you no longer have to choose between finding your way in the dark and getting light at your eyes.
When I get my own place, I will certainly try out all of these ideas. I find them light (hehe) years better than LEDs on computers.
[0]: https://www.lightstec.com/led-strip-light-ideas/
[1]: https://www.lightstec.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/09/led-str...
[2]: https://www.lightstec.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/09/Led-str...
[3]: https://www.lightstec.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/09/Led-str...
[4]: https://www.lightstec.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/07/strip-l...
[5]: https://www.amazon.com/Cabinet-Wardrobe-Switches-Drawers-App...
[6]: https://www.instyleled.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2017/05/pure...
At least... that's the idea. In practice, it's actually quite cumbersome to configure everything thanks to a lack of hardware/software control standards. As a result, I usually don't bother with RGB. Hopefully this app helps to resolve that issue.
Take Factorio as an example(scroll to the very bottom): https://www.factorio.com/blog/post/fff-218
https://github.com/libratbag/piper is another great example that handles mouse configuration.
I also followed posts for component sales and saw a lot of people complaining when a sale didn't apply to RGB RAM or some such.
I ended up buying a case with a side window and incredibly bright fans. I couldn't disable just the fan lights without an additional motherboard adapter, so I cut the LED leads on the fans and called it a day.
All this to say, am I alone in wanting my computer to be a plain box? All those extra lights are just distracting to me.
Edit: after a cursory glance at the comments, it's obvious I am not alone. Maybe I'm just curious why there's such a large market for light-up components.
[1] I was thrilled when some dev showed on twitter that he reserved some key lights to CI build status.
Not because I wanted RGB... I wanted a good keyboard, this was what was available.
I found the RGB useful to see what I am typing at night, problem is... I can't get the thing to behave as I want, and it requires the 'iCUE' program to be running at all times and that programs eats RAM like there is no tomorrow.
If this software lets me ditch iCUE and still have lights... I will certainly use it!
My plan is set my keys to have some darker glow (if possible... never tried) so I can see them on a pitch black room, and use the RGB part for information (like if I am running out of RAM or not...)
I don't care for backlighting much myself, but I often switch between dvorak and йцукен layouts and I use the backlight color to let me know what more I'm currently in. This saves a lot of time when I don't understand why I can't get past a password prompt...
I accept all downvotes.
Seriously, what value do people see in this stuff?
There's nothing more than that to worry about. If its not your jam, then don't get twisted knickers when someone else does.
I'm actually a little appalled at people who carry your & OP's sentiment. Is it really that hard to see that people like visually pleasing things in their lives? Have you ever painted or reorganized a room and spent time picking out the colours & details? Is your wardrobe 20 copies of the same shirt? Did you ever toss up the choice between different vehicles/bikes based on the looks?
I get the part how flashy in your face components aren't appealing, but you sort of have to be intentionally daft not not see why others might like it too.
> Have you ever painted or reorganized a room and spent time picking out the colours & details?
Not really. I spent all of 5 minutes picking out paint colors for my house when I moved in, painted once, and haven't thought about it since.
> Is your wardrobe 20 copies of the same shirt?
Sadly no, but clothing to me is pretty much purely a functional consideration anyway. I pretty much never buy clothing unless I require it for some utilitarian purpose and wear clothes until they become too worn or damaged to wear anymore. If I had to throw out everything I owned and pick a whole new wardrobe, it would have 7 of the same shirt.
> Did you ever toss up the choice between different vehicles/bikes based on the looks?
It's never come up because every vehicle I've ever bought, bikes included, was bought used. If it fits the price range and has what I'm looking for I don't really care what color it is.
I get that other people aren't like that and put what to me is far too much significance on such things, but what I don't get is the added frustration and complexity for such paltry benefit that computer controlled RGB components gets you. It's like people who buy IoT devices and go through all the setup and troubleshooting and just kind of accept that sometimes they don't work because of an issue with the cloud.
[0] Which works so well that these same people are really happy someone made an open source alternative.
Even if you only set it to one color (a perceived static aesthetic) it's nice to have choice for that one color: a) find exactly the color you want and b) alter it later if your taste changes.
However RGB lights on hardware is a lame attempt to force consumers into redundant expenses. After spending solid amount of time choosing parts and building your PC, installing and setting up OS, you have to make another choice regarding color of lightning. You would be endlessly changing it, until you feel satisfied for a couple of days/weeks, or even worse, thinking that is not enough and now the entire room should glow in a color matching currently opened browser tab. I prefer not to have this choice in first place.
Somewhat related to this, friend of mine had been bothering me for a whole month to help him settle on a tattoo sketch. When he finally got it, he was sure happy with it, but fast-forward to now and he remembers it only when somebody else notice.
No but people that want this don't have opaque cases, and are the 'unusual' ones not placing it out of sight.
FWIW it doesn't appeal to me either, I don't think I have any RGB, but I do have RAM styled like fighter jets or something, purely because it was the cheapest match for my criteria at the time (Corsair 'Vengeance' I think).
I will say that I find it (very slightly) annoying when I can find the exact part I want with LEDs but can't find it without. Lighting seems to be default on for the vast majority of components, so its existence forces me to deal with figuring out how to turn it off whereas a non-LED component just does what I want.
I ended up cutting the LED leads on all the fans. It wouldn't have been an issue in the first place if LED/RGB stuff was an optional add-on instead of the default.
Do you really not understand that people have different aesthetic preferences and priorities?
It's really not much different than any other hobby where people show off their work. Mechanical keyboard folks sometimes have many keyboards with all kinds of differences and I can't imagine they use most of them, but the design (combo of frame, keycaps, switches, etc.) gives them something to show off to others.
Not so much as an extern "C" to be found in any header file.
Regarding the value of RGB, honestly one of the cooler uses which the projects been enabling is showing things like system status on your devices. And beyond that, getting a cool pattern or mode implemented is just a fun weekend project.