XPS Gen 2 LED Case Lights -- Controlling Programmatically?

Does anyone know where I could find information on controlling the case lights via a program?

They must have some sort of interface since they ship with a Windows App that can control them. I expect they're probably serial controlled, but I haven't spent much time trying to hack them system (it just arrived a couple of days ago and I'm still stuck working on my 8100 -- which suddenly just got MUCH slower )

I have a whole bunch of apps that could be fun to run with control over the case lights in response to a variety of different things (from battery power to weather to stock to sound, etc.)

I tried asking Dell Tech Support, knowing full well it would be futile, and got absolutely no help.

Anyone?

 

I haven't had any luck finding a program. If there was one, I assume it would infringe on something considering there is a copyright on controlling ambient light or something ridiculous. Plus, not enough people have this laptop like us. Even if yours has 1gb more ram than mine and one step up on the processor

My friend is currently working on a way to do it so we can make a winamp plugin. If either of us gets anywhere, lets let eachother know. lol.

 

Well, at least someone else is trying to figure it out, too. WinAmp was definitely one of my target ideas. It'd be quite cool sitting there, lights all pounding away to the music in the dark.

I'm still contemplating digging out my dusty assembly skills from the early 90s and tracing the app to figure out what it's doing when the sliders move. It can't be that hard... the executable is only 520k and doesn't seem to actually call anything else, as others have pointed out.

Good luck!

(P.S. The RAM was cheap at newegg and the processor, well, that's best done at purchase time as it's normally not an upgradable piece in a laptop. That said, 99% of the time I bet the performance is virtually the same.)