LED madness

Strange things have been happening since I put in the Atheros wireless card from the group buy.

Strange good things and bag things and neutral things, neither good or bad.

First off my wireless connection is like a wired one, it's fantastic. NEVER DROPS, so far.

Second my LED light for the wireless connection doesn't work, but just now after leaving my laptop on overnight to download something my bluetooth light has come on.

Thing is my laptop went into sleep mode, stupid me, I forgot to turn the timer off so my download didn't complete, but my bluetooth light came on and is staying on.

No, I don't have a bluetooth Z70Va model. So why is it on? Will it substitute for my wireless light?

Either way I like it on because I like the way the LEDs on the front look, but without them I feel like something's broken even though it's not.

I just want some answers I guess.

Coriolis, help?

 

The wireless light will only work with an intel wireless card not any other brand.

 

Ditto.......... but that doesn't explain the bluetooth light being on.........

 

What happens if you disable the atheros card? lite go off?

 

Hasn't happened to me.

Back then, only either the 'power' or 'charging' LEDs were on..

Turning it off didn't do anything. I didn't even bother to turn it off because the battery life was neglible.

 

It happened to my Z63a as well. The wireless card was fine. You don't have to worry too much. As long as your Atheros card is working properly, you are happy. Isn't the Atheros card better then Intel one?

 

The bluetooth light is off now, after I turned off my laptop and turned it back on after a few hours.

I kinda wish it stayed on. I miss my blue led lights.

There's gotta be a way to just switch it on permanently.

Coriolis...yeah I love how this wireless card's power consumption is so minute. I can just leave my wireless on without any huge differences in battery life.

Cheers,
Mike

 

i made a tiny application that can turn on your bluetooth light or wireless light. I can send you either one of them if you really miss the light, haha. Heck, i could make you a tiny program that turns both of them on. Haha.

 

Can you make one that flashes to your music?

I remember someone wanted something like that, built into WinAmp which controls the LEDs

 

Leave it to the programmers to play [LED] God...
LOL, you rock flaxx. If I ever want my bluetooth light to come on, I'll send you a msg.

:asus:

 

My wireless lan light never turns on (I switched my wifi card to an Atheros one too)

But the bluetooth one is on when I startup the machine.

 

Strange eh?

Mine doesn't turn on anymore. I kinda wish it did.

Oh well.

 

flaxx~!!!!!!!!! You are a god send. Please send it to me~!!!!

 

haha, okay... i can't find my code... and i was about to go to bed... but whatever, i'll tear it up right now.. a little pre-bed challange and gift for ya. I'll make one program to turn on the bluetooth led and another to turn on the wireless led.

I was actually making a cool a cool light way mail program that you put in all your email accounts and passwords (even webmail) and whenver a new message comes in, the led would turn on. As for the wireless, i was gonna make it integrate with atheros at first, then expand it turn the LED off if there's no connection and blink when an available (non-encrypted) connection is available (and of course lit when connected).

I say this all in past tense, cuz university has gotten the best of me now (i do have most of the mail program implemented, but just don't have time to finish it).... anyway, i'll post this fix for you hopefully tonight if i can wip it off with a GNU compiler (i had issues with VC2005 and haven't needed it for what i'm doing...)

 

flaxx, i'm curious...
will this program work for ALL asus notebooks with bluetooth LEDs? Or just the Z70 series?

 

Alrighty. I'm done. So there's 4 exe's. Two turn on the respective LED's and the other two turn them off. So Shampoo, this ought to keep you happy. Just put it into your startup, haha. Whenever I have time, I'll see about getting back to that mail led program as well as integrating the atheros cards with the leds. In the meantime, enjoy. They can be downloaded at: www.ams.ubc.ca/clubs/cabs/led.zip

Oh and AuroraS, yes, this should work on any Asus laptop provided they have the ATK0100 ACPI driver installed. The bluetooth led won't work on laptops that don't have bluetooth, though. On those laptops, they had a mail-led. Since I don't have bluetooth, I was going to map the mail program to this led.

Also as a note, I compiled this with optimizations for the pentium-m in C using GCC. It should hopefully work on everyone's computer. Please let me know if there are any issues.

Edit: If anyone wants the same capability to turn on and off their mail led, I can make it up in a second. There's a lot of other cools things in this ACPI driver. I can dim the screen and all kinds of interesting stuff. Actually, I think I also discovered a vulnerability with the Asus laptops and a way to kill any asus laptop. I think that's how I killed my first z70va (I don't feel like trying this on my new WORKING z70va... so the code is "safely archived").

 

Just curious... even though the LED doesn't work (without flaxx's code, anyhow), does the button to enable/disable the wireless card still work? Or if one wants wireless off, does it have to be done through software?

 

it has to be done through software. the button is just like any other key on a keyboard and is registered as an event via the atk0100 driver. from there, any software can pick up the event and do something with it.

 

Sounds dangerous! Almost... virus-ish...but worse
I'll give your bluetooth LED a shot in a second :asus:

Interesting how you used some AMS webspace to host your file...haha

 

UPDATE: Well, I tried to run the file(s)...but it turns out I'm missing the cygwin1.dll file or something like that.
I wonder if others will run into the same problem.

 

I was afriad of something like that. I don't have time to mess around with another compiler and I'm not going to reinstall VS2003/5 but I can recompile at university. In the meantime, AuroraS, if you want you can try downloading the dll at:
www.ams.ubc.ca/clubs/cabs/cygwin1.dll and put it in the same folder as those exe's and see if it makes a difference or if it asks for another dll.

 

Interesting... it did turn my wireless LED on/off, but it did not turn my bluetooth LED on/off.
I guess it's different since I'm using a Z63a...

 

interesting.. asus did a wierd little "mod" in the acpi driver to enable the bluetooth. basically it's such a lazy man's approach; all they did was change the driver to recognize DELB (little endian, so that reads BLED for bluetooth LED) instead of DELM (mail led). So your z63a may recognize the mail led instead. If you want i can send you that version (it used to work on my m3np)

 

Nah that's okay... I'm okay with it not working. The blue LEDs kinda give me headaches after a while because they're so darned bright anyway...
Thanks anyway though!

 

Flaxx I could kiss yah, fellow canuck. I knew if you could program you could change the way those buttons work and what not, just needed to get at some programs.

I am not a programmer so I had no idea how to make a program for it to work, but you on the otherhand, genius, pure genius.

WOO HOO~!!!!! Rep points for this one for sure~!!!!!

Maybe this site should host these files? Then host the one he's going to make for the Atheros cards.

Cheers,
Mike

 

Sorry for being a post whore, but OMG YOU FREAKIN' SEXY BASTARD~!!!!! You just made my freakin' MONTH. YES my WHOOOOOOOLE MONTH~!!

I thought I'd never see that light come on again.

My bluetooth light is brighter than my Wireless one, but what the hell I turned 'em both on even though I don't have bluetooth.

Somebody give this man a freakin' ... new laptop or something~!!!!

LOVE,
Mike

 

haha! simply halarious! i'm glad i could bring so much happiness to someone.

 

flaxx, Thank you Can you look into finishing the LED/Wireless control program? That'd be awesome

 

Yeap, if you can make one(or multiple, for different machines) I can add it to the FAQ as well as host it.

 

i can see what i can do. with a full course load, it could be hard, but i may be able to count it as a project for one of my courses and budget the time that way.

 

flaxx, it's reading break!
You should have lots of time to do what you want to do

 

haha, dude i know. when i'm not studying at home, i'm hitting the slopes! lol

 

I was wondering if you could provide the source code for some of us other programmers to look at or if you don't want to do that could you pm a message to me because I am interested on how if was programmed.

 

Same here.. i want to see the codes ^_^.

 

Here's the code to turn on the wireless led. I thank Howard for the nifty info which subsequently got me all interested in messing with hardware programming. As you will see, the code is totaly stripped down and VERY simple. It would be easy to make them blink (one way would be to have the process sleep for 1000ms then change the state). To blink to music would be more code cuz you gotta figure out how you discover the beat of the tune, and what not, unless you just used a Gaussian on the frequency curve to sub-sample the data and blink the lights to the bass line.

If you look at the bottom, where I call CtrlACPI(WLED, 1, true), the true part means turn the LED on. If you set this to false, it'll turn it off. I used the following arguments to compile it with GCC: -Os -march=pentium-m -pipe -mwindows -fomit-frame-pointer

#include <shlobj.h>
HANDLE ATKACPIhandle;
#define WLED 0x44454c57

int ATKACPIctrl(int code, int hasArg, int arg)
{
long bytes = NULL;
long inbuffer[5];
struct cmbuffer
{
short cmds[2];
long cm2;
} cbuffer;
long outbuffer[192];

cbuffer.cmds[0] = 0;
cbuffer.cmds[1] = 4;
cbuffer.cm2 = arg;
inbuffer[0] = 2;
inbuffer[1] = code;
inbuffer[2] = hasArg;
inbuffer[3] = hasArg * 8;
inbuffer[4] = (long)&cbuffer;

return DeviceIoControl(ATKACPIhandle, 0x222404, inbuffer, sizeof(inbuffer), outbuffer, sizeof(outbuffer), (LPDWORD) &bytes, NULL);
}

int main(void)
{
ATKACPIhandle = CreateFile( "\\\\.\\ATKACPI", GENERIC_READ|GENERIC_WRITE, FILE_SHARE_READ|FILE_SHARE_WRITE, NULL, OPEN_EXISTING, NULL, NULL);
if (!ATKACPIhandle) return 1; // Return if driver is not loaded

ATKACPIctrl(WLED, 1, true); // Turn on the wireless LED
return 0;
}

 

Whoa dude that was freaky. I was just reading over this thread and was thinking about it and all of a sudden you posted a reply.

FREAKY.

Thanks for the source code, I'm gonna play with it.

 

i know, i sensed it... haha!