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LED Controllers

bjornstahl edited this page Sep 11, 2017 · 1 revision

The engine has support for a limited range of built-in LED controllers, those that are provided by the input platform (like numlock/capslock on a keyboard), the display platform (backlight control on laptops) and some special USB- based controllers (like the PacDrive).

They can be controlled via the set_led and set_led_rgb calls respectively, and can be queried or rescanned via the controller_leds command. Dynamic changes to the set of available led controllers are delivered as a normal applname_input_event with the kind field set to status.

There is also the option to add one external LED controller over a simple FIFO protocol, which is the preferred way for adding support for new devices that are not coupled to platform-managed device.

It is enabled by setting the ext_led key for the 'arcan' appl in the database, like this:

    arcan_db add_appl_kv arcan ext_led /tmp/led_fifo

it will register with the label (fifo), and led control commands follow this 2-byte protocol:

byte 1 byte 2 description
A set active led to ALL
a ind set active led to ind
r val set subchannel R value
g val set subchannel G value
b val set subchannel B value
i val set subchannel ALL value (intensity)
c 0 or 1 commit, update the set led or if !0, queue
o deregistered, FIFO will be terminated.

More devices can be added by continuing the pattern, like ext_led_2, ext_led_3 and so on.

There is a skeleton client implementation in src/tools/leddec.c for testing that the feature works, and for saving a few seconds when wrapping some LED device. There are also some more loosely covered patches to drivers, and custom jobs for things like arduino at aledctrl.

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