Dell XPS Vanity Lights Blink!

My newest computer is a Dell XPS thing. It’s a huge monster of a laptop (really a gaming laptop, good for the performance). It comes with external LED lights on the top, sides and bottom. These lights are normally only configurable though a custom program. Since I got the PC, I have been dying to find a way to control these LEDs from a script. Finally, today, I found out how.

A post on Notebookforums made med aware of the tool API Monitor, which allows me to see how a program is using the Win32-API. From there, it was easy to recreate a program to do the same. The hardest part was that I decided to try to use the Ruby Win32API interface to call the methods. It was hard to find out how to pass the arguments, and in the end, I ended up with a pure C solution.

The final solution is a command line program, which allows me to script it. I have encapsulated the modification of the LEDs in a simple function for easier reuse.

For any reader with an XPS who would like to replicate it, I have posted the C source code and Executable. These files are licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution2.5 License.

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Creative Commons License

Update: The previous version of the xps_led_control.exe required cygwin installed on the client PC. I have compiled a new version that presumably should run without cygwin.dll. If you have the chance to test this out, I appreciate positive or negative feedback as to whether it works. Thanks.

About Johannes Brodwall

Johannes is Principal Software Engineer in SopraSteria. In his spare time he likes to coach teams and developers on better coding, collaboration, planning and product understanding.
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