colormemuch

Full control of every RGB light on the Acer Predator Helios Neo 16S AI (PHN16S-71) — the 4-zone keyboard backlight and the lid "shield" logo — from a native Rust + egui desktop app for Windows. What PredatorSense won't expose, this does: per-zone color, custom effects, and a scriptable path to the same lighting hardware the vendor hides behind presets.

What it does

Three effect types, each wired to how the hardware actually works:

Type	Runs on	Scope	Cost	Editable
Core — firmware effects (Neon, Wave, Meteor, Shifting, Zoom, Twinkling…)	the keyboard controller	whole device	zero host CPU	color · speed · brightness
Program — built-in animations (Rainbow, Comet, Fire, Gradient, Police, Wave, Breathe)	our Rust engine	per zone	≈0.5% CPU	code
Custom — your own palette + motion	our Rust engine	per zone	≈0.5% CPU	fully, in-app

• Per-zone independent control on one shared clock. Every zone commands its own source; two zones running the same function are phase-locked with no drift. Gang them Link (identical) or Spread (the effect travels across the zones) per group.
• A live custom-effect editor. Build an effect from a color palette and a motion (Static / Scroll / Bounce / Pulse / Twinkle), tune speed and brightness, watch a live preview, name it, save it. Custom effects persist to %APPDATA%/ColorMeMuch/effects.json.
• Everything sticks. Your whole setup — per-device mode, every zone's assignment, master brightness, Link/Spread groups — is restored on launch.
• The lid shield too. The Predator cover-logo LED the Linux drivers never mapped is a first-class device here.
• Light on the machine. Adaptive frame rate per effect; static zones and idle devices send nothing. Full animation costs ≈0.5% CPU.

How the lighting is actually driven

The obvious route was the AcerGamingFunction WMI interface. It's a dead end for lighting — every WMI color write is accepted but never reaches the LEDs; that class governs fans, thermals, and profiles, not the backlight.

Reverse engineering (the scripts/*.ps1 toolkit) found the real path: Acer bundles OpenRGB. The PredatorSense package ships OpenRGB.exe and runs it as a local SDK server on 127.0.0.1:6742; AcerLightingService is itself an OpenRGB client. The LEDs are three OpenRGB controllers — AcerHIDKeyboard (4 zones), AcerHIDCoverLogoLED (the lid shield), and AcerHIDModeKeyLED. So colormemuch speaks the OpenRGB SDK directly — a small blocking std::net client, no elevation required.

Install

Grab the latest .msi from Releases and run it. The installer places the app in Program Files with a Start-menu shortcut; the built-in updater surfaces new releases on each launch.

The keyboard is driven through the OpenRGB server that Acer's own PredatorSense install already runs — no extra service to install.

Build from source

cargo build --release

For the Windows MSI (requires WiX Toolset on PATH):

cargo install cargo-wix
cargo wix

Project layout

.
├── Cargo.toml
├── build.rs                 # git-tag versioning + winres icon embed
├── assets/                  # logo, banner, app icon, admin manifest
├── src/
│   ├── main.rs              # eframe entry + identity constants
│   ├── app.rs               # egui shell: menu bar, panels, save hook
│   ├── ui.rs                # the RGB control screen — device panel,
│   │                        #   per-zone cards, effect editor, persistence
│   ├── openrgb.rs           # OpenRGB SDK client (enumerate, set LEDs,
│   │                        #   invoke firmware effects) — no elevation
│   ├── effects.rs           # Fx (Program/Custom), pure fn(t,n) effects,
│   │                        #   shared-clock render pipeline, Link/Spread
│   ├── library.rs           # custom-effect schema (palette + motion) +
│   │                        #   on-disk library
│   ├── rgb.rs, wmi.rs        # WMI layer — kept for fan/thermal/profile
│   │                        #   reads (NOT lighting; see above)
│   ├── config.rs            # %APPDATA% config
│   └── git_update.rs        # GitHub-releases self-updater
├── scripts/                 # the reverse-engineering toolkit that found
│                            #   the OpenRGB path (probes, traces, decoders)
└── wix/main.wxs             # MSI installer

Prior art

• JafarAkhondali/acer-predator-turbo-and-rgb-keyboard-linux-module — decoded the 4-zone keyboard payload
• FelipeFMA/nekro-sense — the PHN16-72 sibling; confirmed the enable-flag byte
• OpenRGB — the mechanism Acer ships and colormemuch talks to

Status

✅ Working desktop app. Keyboard (4 zones) and the lid shield are both under full control. Not yet built: a CLI (colormemuch set --keyboard rainbow …) for scripting, a system tray with global hotkeys, and moving animation to a worker thread so effects keep running while the window is minimized.

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_{A Tecnocrática desktop app · Rust + egui · self-updating MSI · Windows.}