rogauracore - RGB keyboard control for Asus ROG laptops

(c) 2019 Will Roberts

Linux-compatible open-source libusb implementation similar to the ROG Aura Core software. Supports RGB keyboards with IDs 0b05:1854 (GL553, GL753), 0b05:1869 (GL503, FX503, GL703), 0b05:1866 (GL504, GL533, GL703, GX501, GM501), and 0b05:19b6 (GA503).

Usage

Usage:
   rogauracore COMMAND ARGUMENTS

COMMAND should be one of:
   single_static
   single_breathing
   single_colorcycle
   multi_static
   multi_breathing
   rainbow_cycle
   red
   green
   blue
   yellow
   gold
   cyan
   magenta
   white
   black
   rainbow
   brightness
   initialize_keyboard

In typical use, you will need root privileges to directly communicate with the laptop's keyboard. This is easy to do with sudo. Try some of these commands and see what works for you:

sudo rogauracore single_static 0000ff
sudo rogauracore single_static 00ff00
sudo rogauracore single_static ffff00
sudo rogauracore multi_static ff0000 ffff00 00ff00 00ffff
sudo rogauracore single_colorcycle 1

If your keyboard does not respond to rogauracore, it may help to send an initialisation message to the keyboard to "wake it up":

sudo rogauracore initialize_keyboard

If your keyboard remains dark, its brightness might have defaulted to 0. Try:

sudo rogauracore brightness 3

Installation

Ubuntu

In all cases you will need libusb and libusb-dev installed:

sudo apt install libusb-1.0-0 libusb-1.0-0-dev

Optionally you might also need build tools:

sudo apt install build-essential

Retrieve the rogauracore package, either through curl or git:

VERSION=1.6
curl -LOs https://github.com/wroberts/rogauracore/releases/download/$VERSION/rogauracore-$VERSION.tar.gz
tar xf rogauracore-$VERSION.tar.gz
cd rogauracore-$VERSION/

or

git clone https://github.com/wroberts/rogauracore.git
cd rogauracore
autoreconf -i

Then configure, make and install:

./configure
make
sudo make install

Tips and tricks

On some machines, running rogauracore can cause the system's power management to not be able to find the keyboard backlight control. This manifests as unresponsive UI controls for brightening and darkening the keyboard backlight. If this issue affects you, @willlovesbearz suggests running this command after rogauracore:

sudo systemctl restart upower.service

Related projects

• rogauracore-gui is an Electron-based GUI for rogauracore by @rastafaninplakeibol.

• OpenRGB can probably do all the things that rogauracore can do.