It is an open source RGB lighting control that does not depend on the manufacturer's software
After almost a year of development the release of the new version of OpenRGB 0.8 was announced, an open source toolset for controlling RGB lighting on peripherals.
The bundle is compatible with ASUS, Gigabyte, ASRock and MSI motherboards with RGB subsystem for case lighting, ASUS, Patriot, Corsair and HyperX backlit memory modules, ASUS Aura/ROG graphics cards, MSI GeForce, Sapphire Nitro and Gigabyte Aorus, multi-driver LED strips.
Main new features of OpenRGB 0.8
In this new version that comes from OpenRGB 0.8 the list of compatible devices has been replenished with a lot of video cardsor ASUS, Gigabyte, EVGA, MSI, Gainward and Palit.
In addition to a host of "classic" peripherals that have had support added to them, the list also includes NanoLeaf modular lights, for home devices you can now use SRGBMods Raspberry Pi Pico, and Arduino can now be connected via i2c.
It is also highlighted that added support for NVIDIA Illumination video cards, but at the moment, like older NVIDIA video cards, it only works on Windows, due to difficulties with i2c which works through NVIDIA's proprietary driver (the problem is fixed by installing the beta driver). The famous issue with MSI MysticLight motherboards has been resolved and they are now supported again, and the list of supported motherboards has been expanded.
Another of the changes that is presented in this new version is that udev rules are now automatically generated, besides that the inpout32 library, which caused problems when working in parallel with some antivirus and anti-cheats (Vanguard), has been replaced by WinRing0.
In order to work correctly in parallel with the official software for SMBus devices in Windows, a mutex system is now used, which solves most of the problems.
On the part of the known issues include:
- The configuration path must not yet contain non-ASCII characters. A fix has been prepared but not included in the release to maintain compatibility with existing plugins, but will be included in actual builds after the release.
- The fact that keyboard manufacturer Sinowealth reused the VID/PID values of Redragon keyboards using a different protocol was revealed. To avoid potential issues (up to and including scaling), the Sinowealth keyboard support code is now disabled and not supported.
- The "wave" effect does not work on Redragon M711.
- Some Corsair mice do not have LED labels.
- On some Razer keyboards, the list of layouts is not complete.
- Asus number of addressable channels may not be accurate.
How to install OpenRGB on Linux?
For those who are interested in being able to install OpenRGB on their system, they should follow the instructions that we share below. The first thing we must do is install the latest edition of Qt Creator. (You can check the details of the Qt Creator installation in the following link).
In the case of Ubuntu and derivatives we must install some dependencies:
sudo apt install qt5-default libusb-1.0-0-dev libhidapi-dev
Now we are going to obtain the utility with the command:
git clone https://gitlab.com/CalcProgrammer1/OpenRGB
Done this now we must update the submodules:
git submodule update --init –recursive
And here we can do two things, one of them is to open the project with QT creator or compile it in the system.
To compile, just run the following commands:
cd OpenRGB
qmake OpenRGB.pro
make -j8
./OpenRGB
At the end of the compilation we must allow access to SMBus.
In Intel we can do it with the command:
modprobe i2c-dev i2c-i801
Or in the case of AMD, we must first list the SMBus drivers with:
sudo i2cdetect -l
Once the controller has been identified, we must grant permissions to the controller, for example:
sudo chmod 777 /dev/i2c-0
Finally, it should be taken into account that there are still some capabilities to persist in all reboots, but the main functionality of configuring colors and modes is stable.
As usual, it is recommended to recreate existing profiles for devices after upgrade, the old ones may not work or work incorrectly, and when upgrading from versions to 0.6, you need to clear the plugins folder, because before 0.6 there was no plugin API versioning system.
If you want to know more about it you can check the details In the following link.