Cross platform Alienware Leds commandline tool, driver and library.

• Author: Fabián Ezequiel Gallina
• Contact: fabian at anue dot biz
• Project homepage: https://github.com/fgallina/palienwarey/

Using pip should suffice:

$ pip install palienwarey

Besides the library, this package comes with three handy commandline tools:

• lsd: the led software driver commandline tool.
• lsdetect: a tool to detect led addresses on Alienware devices.
• lsdaemon: a driver daemon intended to provide access to lsd commands to non-root users. The use of the daemon is a convenience and it's not mandatory.

The lsd command can be run either using the lsdaemon as intermediary to talk to the Alienware lights device (this enables non-root users to send commands to the device without the need of custom udev rules) or, alternatively, can be used directly with no daemon, provided it has enough priviledges.

See the lsd help for usage and examples.

The lsdaemon has no much variants, it only needs to be run with administrative priviledges and after that you can send commands to it:

# lsdaemon
INFO lsdaemon:140 Serving on: 0.0.0.0:6587 (coding utf-8)

If you saw that, you are ready to go. Check the --port and --host switches and use the --help to check what else the daemon has to offer. A cool possibility for the daemon is not to only allow you to run lsd in userspace but also you could remotely control your leds!

This is the main reason for palienware to exists, it can be run standalone (provided it has enough priviledges to access the USB device) or send messages to the device through the lsdaemon by adding the --daemon flag.

Depending on your machine definition the flags vary, but they should be pretty similar. Anyhow all these examples are based on the Alienware 14 2013 model since that's the only thing I have at hand. Check your machine specific flags by calling the lsd command with the --help switch.

Every zone supports up to three commands: color (shorthand c), morph (shorthand m) and pulse (shorthand p). Capabilities for each zone are set by defzone when defining new machines.

The lsd command comes with a handy switch called --all to define a set of color configurations for all zones that not groups nor power:

# lsd --all color:ffcc00

You can also use c shorthand for the set color command:

# lsd --all c:ffcc00

The keyboard is a special group zone (just like the previous --all), it might or might not have been defined for your machine. Again add --help when calling lsd to check for defined zones. If a group zone so fundamental like this has not yet been added to your machine, please file a bug and I'll add it (pull requests welcome):

# lsd --kbd morph:ffcc00:ff0000 pulse:ff0000 morph:ff0000:ffcc00 pulse:ffcc00

This is handy for when you want an specific configuration shared for most zones but you have special rules for others. For this there's the --cascade switch.

Consider this example:

# lsd --kbd c:ffcc00 --kbd-left c:00ff00 --kbd-right c:00ff00

With this, what will happen is that all keyboard zones will be set to ffcc00, but then for the left side and right side of the keyboard the 00ff00 color will be added as another configuration for the zone loop, so that will render in a color switch for keyboard sides. If what you really wanted was to provide a default configuration for the whole keyboard but set different configurations for both sides, then the --cascade switch will come to help:

# lsd --kbd c:ffcc00 --kbd-left c:00ff00 --kbd-right c:00ff00 --cascade

In this case we are saving the provided leds configuration for boot and ac, check your machine supported modes with the handy --help switch:

# lsd --kbd morph:ffcc00:ff0000 pulse:ff0000 morph:ff0000:ffcc00 pulse:ffcc00 --mode-boot --mode-ac --save

In newer models using the MODE_VERSION_2 (I assume this, since the only device I ever got my hands on is an Alienware 14 2013), it seems the power button won't update when no specific modes has been set for commands sent to the USB device. This means that you won't see the power button changing, unless you set an specific power mode and you are actually using it. A tip is to use the --mode-ac (or whatever power mode you are currently into) to try out power button configurations and then set it properly into the mode you really wanted:

# Lsd --power c:ffcc00 --mode-ac # we'll set this to show when on battery

# lsd --power c:ff0000 --mode-ac # we'll set this to shown when battery is low

Now that you tested color (or even loop) configurations and are sure of what you would use for the different power modes available in your machines you can now proceed and just do that:

# lsd --power c:00ff00 --mode-ac --save # Use green when on AC Power

# lsd --power c:ffcc00 --mode-batpower # Use orange when on Battery Power

# lsd --power c:ff0000 --mode-batlow # Use red when Battery is Low

The lsdetect is a really simple, interactive command that will guide you in the process of finding your machine led addresses by going through the list of every possible address and prompting you if something changed. The most relevant switch for this command is the --color one (defaults to ffffff).

Once you are done with all the lsdetect questions, it will print a defmachine you can add in the palienware.machines module and use as a starting point for adding support to your device.

• Alienware 14 2013
• M11XR3
• M14XR1
• M17XR3
• M18XR2
• M11XR25
• M11XR2
• M11XR1
• M15XAllPowerful
• M15XArea51

• USBPcap: for the Windows USB packet capture I used as a start.
• Wireshark: for their awesome GUI for checking pcap files.
• PyAlienFX: I used it fairly good as a reference for how the USB protocol was like and support for other machines than mine.
• Benjamin Thaut: for his handy AlienFX leds tester which inspired lsdetect and which I used to detect mine.

1. Cleanup and push tests.
2. Create a simple GUI (more as an example than anything else) using Tkinter.
3. Add support for theme files.
4. Add a configuration files for overriding defaults.
5. Handle daemon concurrency properly.