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Corsair keyboard replacement rubber feet
In the course of carting my Corsair K70-RGB around, a couple of the rubber feet on the bottom of the keyboard came off, one of which I lost. After searching Corsair's webstore in vain, I contacted Corsair about buying replacements. They don't sell the rubber feet, but they were willing to RMA my keyboard because it was wobbly. Unfortunately, I would have recieved a newer model with an updated controller. That's usually a bonus, but I'm using the Open Source ckb to drive the keyboard, and support for the newer model is still in a development branch.
So I went looking for an alternative solution.
I carved a replacement rubber foot out of some old tire rubber. While that worked, there's a better solution.
Corsair does not sell replacement rubber feet for the K70, but they do sell replacement wrist rests. Those wrist rests sport three of these same rubber feet on the bottom.
They appear to be the same as on the K95 and its wrist rest. I used Gorilla brand superglue gel to affix them to the keyboard, which bonds them more securely than Corsair's original adhesive.
So for $10+s/h, you can buy a set of three rubber feet... they just come packaged on a wrist rest.
Driving Corsair Gaming keyboards on Linux with Python, IV
Here is a new release of my Corsair keyboard software.
The 0.4 release of rgbkbd includes:
- Union Jack animation and still image
- Templates and tools for easier customization
- Re-introduced brightness control
New Flag
For our friends across the pond, here's a Union Jack.
I started with this public domain image (from Wikipedia)
I scaled it down to 53px wide, cropped it to 18px tall, and saved that as uka.png in the flags/k95 directory. I then cropped it to 46px wide and saved that as flags/k70/uka.png. Then I ran make.
Here is what it looks like on the K95:
Tools
To make it easier to draw images for the keyboard, I created templates for the supported keyboards that are suitable for use with simple graphics programs.
Each key has an outline in not-quite-black, so you can flood fill each key. Once that image is saved, ./tools/template2pattern modified-template-k95.png images/k95/mine.png will convert that template to something the animated GIF mode can use. A single image will obviously give you a static image on the keyboard.
But you can also use this with ImageMagick's convert to create an animation without too much trouble.
For example, if you used template-k70.png to create 25 individual frames of an animation called template-k70-fun-1.png through template-k70-run-25.png, you could create an animated GIF with these commands (in bash):
for frame in {1..25}; do
./tools/template2pattern template-k70-fun-$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.
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:
And the Knight Rider inspired animation:
Grab the source code, or the pre-built binary tarball.
Update: Driving Corsair Gaming keyboards on Linux with Python, IV
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.
Update: Driving Corsair Gaming keyboards on Linux with Python, III
