Keyboard Leds

About

This projects mimics (to the extent possible) the flashing leds of high end gaming keyboards, on a cheap regular keyboard. It flashes the available leds (num lock, caps lock, scroll lock) as a high end keyboard would flash other leds.

Files

"keyboardLed.py" represents a led keyboard light in Linux. The class allows you to comfortably control a keyboard led. "flashOnKeystroke.py" hooks the keyboard strokes and uses "keyboardLed" to flash the keyboard leds on each keystroke

Running

simply clone or download this code, and then

sudo python flashOnKeystroke.py

in the folder with the downloaded files

Working With Keyboard Leds In Linux

to get list of available leds:

ls /sys/class/leds/

controlling leds manually

to turn on

echo "1" | sudo tee /sys/class/leds/<led_name>/brightness

to turn off

echo "0" | sudo tee /sys/class/leds/<led_name>/brightness

change "<led_name>" with an available led from your computer

to get names of devices with leds attached

cat /sys/class/leds/*/device/name | sort | uniq

Trouble Shooting

ModuleNotFoundError: No module named 'pyxhook'

you're missing the module to hook keystrokes. simply

sudo pip3 install pyxhook

Xlib.error.DisplayConnectionError: Can't connect to display ":0"

in the terminal run

xhost +

and then try running the program again and when done run

xhost -

to revert changes from previous command

PermissionError: ERROR: Don't have access to '/sys/class/leds/...'

run as root with

sudo python flashOnKeystroke.py

No error messages, but doesn't work

instead of running 'main()' run 'test()' if the lights flicker, the problem is in hooking the keboard with pyxhook

Known Issues

doesn't support windows
holding keys down for extended periods of time will result in delayed led flashing

mavlevin/keyboardleds