ZephyrusBling is a utility that can display text and images on the back of the ASUS ROG Zephyrus G14 laptop using asus-nb-ctrl.

• Displaying images
• Text rendering (with ImageMagick)
• Animations with linear transforms (rotations, translations and scaling only) and adjusting image brightness
• Aligning the text with grid for sharp letters
• Displaying desktop notifications
• Displaying battery status

The following libraries are used:

• Boost
• CLI11
• fmt
• glm
• GSL
• sdbus-c

In ArchLinux, these are in the following packages: boost, cli11 (from AUR), fmt, glm, microsoft-gsl, sdbus-cpp (from AUR).

mkdir build
cd build
cmake ..
cmake --build . -j 10

asus-nb-ctrl should also be running to actually send the images to the LEDs.

This assumes the asusd service is started and you have the correct permissions.

From the build directory, start the DBus service:

./zephyrusblingd

In another terminal, display an image or some text:

./zephyrusbling --text "Hello world" --fx translate:0,20,0:3,-25,0
./zephyrusbling --image ../tux.png --fx scale:0.8,0.8 --fx rotate:0,0:3,19 --fx translate:0,-20,0:3,20,0
./zephyrusbling --image ../tux.png --duration 5 --fx alpha:3,0:3.5,1:5,0 --fx scale:3,0.4,0.4:5,1,1 --fx translate:3,0,0:5,5,0

By default, the text or image disappears after 3 seconds, use the --duration option to override it.

Each --fx specifies a transform to apply, with the following format: effect:params(:params)*

Each param is a sequence of comma separated floating point numbers whose meaning depends on the effect.

If only one param is given for the effect, it stays constant while the image is displayed. If there are several, the first number of each param is a timestamp since the image is first displayed and the others are the arguments. In the latter case, the arguments are linearly interpolated with respect to time.

The effect can be:

• translate: the 2 arguments are the displacement in cm on the X and Y axes
• rotate: the argument is the angle in radian
• scale: the 2 arguments are the scaling factor on the X and Y axes
• brightness: the argument is a multiplier applied on the grey channel of the image
• alpha: the argument is a multiplier applied on the alpha channel of the image

For the moment the Z order is not implemented, so when several images overlap it is not predictable which one is on top...