Posts for the month of November 2015

Driving Corsair Gaming keyboards on Linux with Python, IV

Here is a new release of my Corsair keyboard software.

The 0.4 release of rgbkbd includes:

  • Union Jack animation and still image
  • Templates and tools for easier customization
  • Re-introduced brightness control

New Flag

For our friends across the pond, here's a Union Jack.

I started with this public domain image (from Wikipedia)

I scaled it down to 53px wide, cropped it to 18px tall, and saved that as uka.png in the flags/k95 directory. I then cropped it to 46px wide and saved that as flags/k70/uka.png. Then I ran make.

Here is what it looks like on the K95:

Union Jack animation

Tools

To make it easier to draw images for the keyboard, I created templates for the supported keyboards that are suitable for use with simple graphics programs.

K95 template

K70 template

Each key has an outline in not-quite-black, so you can flood fill each key. Once that image is saved, ./tools/template2pattern modified-template-k95.png images/k95/mine.png will convert that template to something the animated GIF mode can use. A single image will obviously give you a static image on the keyboard.

But you can also use this with ImageMagick's convert to create an animation without too much trouble.

For example, if you used template-k70.png to create 25 individual frames of an animation called template-k70-fun-1.png through template-k70-run-25.png, you could create an animated GIF with these commands (in bash):

for frame in {1..25}; do
    ./tools/template2pattern template-k70-fun-$frame.png /tmp/k70-fun-$frame.png
done
convert /tmp/k70-fun-{1..25}.png images/k70/fun.gif
rm -f /tmp/k70-fun-{1..25}.png

Brightness control

This version re-introduces the brightness level control so the "light" key toggles through four brightness levels.

Grab the source code, or the pre-built binary tarball.

Previous release

Driving Corsair Gaming keyboards on Linux with Python, III

Here is a new release of my Corsair keyboard software.

The 0.3 release of rgbkbd includes:

  • Add flying flag animations
  • Add Knight Rider inspired animation
  • Support images with filenames that have extensions
  • Cleanup of the Pac-Man inspired animation code

Here is what the flying Texas flag looks like: Animated Texas flag

And the Knight Rider inspired animation: Knight Rider inspired animation

Grab the source code, or the pre-built binary tarball.

Previous release

Update: Driving Corsair Gaming keyboards on Linux with Python, IV