Dell XPS Vanity Lights
I have a Dell Inspiron XPS Gen 2 laptop. Long name for a big laptop.
It has some “vanity lights” on the lid, in the vents and speaker grilles. They are controllable via options in the BIOS and with a Windows based application. When I bought it the first thing I did was install Linux so I have never had the chance to play with controlling the lights from within the OS, only at boot-time from the BIOS.
Until now!
Yesterday I emailed Richard Hughes (he of Gnome Power Manager and general laptop-cleverness fame) and asked if he knew how it might be possible to control the LEDs from within Linux. He pointed me to Matt Domsch at Dell who is a Software Architect within Dell Linux Solutions. Michael Brown – also at Dell, looks after the libsmbios libraries, tools and mailing lists. Within a few hours Matt told me it’s already been done, there is a tool that can potentially manipulate the lights from within Linux! This made me quite happy.
A guy called Ed H wrote a tool and gave the code to the community (yay, free software rules!) which can change the colour of the LEDs, make them brighter, dimmer and so on. Here’s what it looks like when you monkey around with it 
Here’s a video showing what it looks like when it’s going:-
- lights.ogg – 1.5M
- lights.avi – 2.1M
- lights.mov – 1.9M
Note: Had some problems with the avi and mov, let me know if you can’t play them. I don’t have an Apple or Windows machine in the house, so can’t test.
In the video I ran the utility in strobe mode, then made the lights go blue with the brightness climbing then dropping to give a fade up and down effect, then switched to red for the same. Finally I had the lights blink on and off repeatedly.
Now of course what to do with this new functionality? Here’s some ideas:-
- Notify when new email arrives
- Alert when a highlight word is said on IRC
- Reminder of calendar events
- Alerts when system resources are low
- Indicate when remote systems are unavailable
- Alert when battery is low – possibly a dumb one, that
- …? What else?
Unfortunately it’s not quick to change the light or brightness, so changing rapidly in time with music is probably not going to work.
At least now people at my local LUG can’t tell me the lights are pointless!
9 Comments
You could have the brightness correspond with how much battery is remaining. That way you’ll know how much power is left, and it won’t use as much near the end.
I suspect the LEDs don’t actually draw that much especially when compared with the 17″ panel :S
You might want to fix the video links, as they all point to lights.avi.
I have been told the avi and mov don’t play well, so will re-encode them. For now it’s just the ogg.
> …? What else?
There’s been quite a lot of work done in the Home Automation (HA) community, about what meaning can be conveyed with a single light.
One of the neatest applications I ever saw was to run a hall way (multi-coloured) LED on a cycle.
- By default, the LED would stay off
- If the external temperature were sub-zero the light would go blue (networked external temp sensor)
- If the garage door were left open the light would go red (networked external relay contact)
- If something else, and I forget what, happened, the light would go green
- If several of the conditions were met, then the appropriate colours would cycle about 5 seconds per colour… so if the garage door were open, and it was -2, then it would be -5 sec RED -5 sec BLUE – 5 sec RED – 5 sec BLUE in a loop.
It appeared that three colours were about all that a “normal human” could parse reliably…
Mark
I binary clock comes to mind…
I’m not sure if you have enough LEDs, or if it will be more then a “geek toy”, but it exists: http://www.thinkgeek.com/homeoffice/lights/59e0/
Oh, and btw, the link to your blog is broken from “planet.ubuntu.com” RSS (bloglines sends me to an invalid URL).
Great news, I was wishing for this for a long time, but never bothered to find out.
Also, the model name for that notebook is M1710.
The lights *are* kinda pointless even if you can find a use for them. Bwahhaaha!
Winamp on windows has a great plugin able to switch the colours and brightness quick enough for music visualisation, so definatly possible.
I’d love to see a system using bluemon so that the lights flash red for X repetitions as you walk away to show that the laptop is locked up and the same (maybe green) when you walk back in range.
If a movie is being played in full screen the lights on the back could approximate the average colour on the screen so that it lights up the area behind the laptop (e.g. wall or boss’ face) giving a kind of ambiant light effect, i think sony have done some sort of thing like this on one of their new TVs.
Great work by Ed H.