Posts for the month of September 2015

Driving Corsair Gaming keyboards on Linux with Python, II

Since I wrote about Driving the Corsair Gaming K70 RGB keyboard on Linux with Python, the ckb project has released v0.2. With that came changes to the protocol used to communicate with ckb-daemon which broke my rgbkbd tool.

So I had to do some work on the code. But that wasn't the only thing I tackled.

The 0.2 release of rgbkbd includes:

  • Updates the code to work with ckb-daemon v0.2
  • Adds support for the K95-RGB, in addition to the existing support for the K70-RGB.
  • Adds a key-stroke driven "ripple" effect.
  • Adds a "falling-letter" animation, inspired by a screen saver which was inspired by The Matrix.
  • Adds support for displaying images on the keyboard, with a couple of example images.
  • Adds support for displaying animated GIFs on the keyboard, with an example animated GIF.

That's right; you can play animated GIFs on these keyboards. The keyboards have a very low resolution, obviously, but internally, I represent them as an image sized based on a standard key being 2x2 pixels. That allows for half-key offsets in the mapping of pixels to keys which gets a reasonable approximation. Keys are colored based on averaging the color of the pixels for that key. Larger keys are backed by more pixels. If the image dimensions don't match the dimensions of the keyboard's image buffer (46x14 for K70, 53x14 for K95), it will slowly scroll around the image. Since the ideal image size depends on the keyboard model, the image files are segregated by model name.

Here is what that looks like:

(Also available on YouTube)

Grab the source code and have fun.

Previous release

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