During fiddling with rog-control-center, I was somehow able to make the backlight go off and couldn't get it back on. It even persisted through multiple reboots (notably right after asusd service started).
Knowing that, I started fiddling with the /etc/asusd/aura.ron configuration file:
--- /etc/asusd/aura.ron.on 2023-08-28 00:23:42.772230250 +0200
+++ /etc/asusd/aura.ron.off 2023-08-28 00:24:46.138402944 +0200
@@ -88,36 +88,36 @@
enabled: AuraDevRog2((
keyboard: (
zone: Keyboard,
- boot: true,
- awake: true,
+ boot: false,
+ awake: false,
sleep: false,
shutdown: false,
),
logo: (
zone: Keyboard,
- boot: true,
- awake: true,
+ boot: false,
+ awake: false,
sleep: false,
shutdown: false,
),
lightbar: (
zone: Keyboard,
- boot: true,
- awake: true,
+ boot: false,
+ awake: false,
sleep: false,
shutdown: false,
),
lid: (
zone: Keyboard,
- boot: true,
- awake: true,
+ boot: false,
+ awake: false,
sleep: false,
shutdown: false,
),
rear_glow: (
zone: Keyboard,
- boot: true,
- awake: true,
+ boot: false,
+ awake: false,
sleep: false,
shutdown: false,
),Where --- denote what I'd put to turn it on and +++ to turn it off. After those changes, restarting the asusd service would turn the backlight on/off respectively.
Given that it was a messy solution that even I wasn't satisfied with, I decided to dig a bit deeper and tried Wireshark, from whom I learned that it was sending USBHID requests to the device:
| Order | Backlight On | Backlight Off |
|---|---|---|
| 0 | 5d b3 00 00 a6 00 00 eb 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 |
5d b3 00 00 a6 00 00 eb 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 |
| 1 | 5d b5 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 |
5d b5 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 |
| 2 | 5d b4 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 |
5d b4 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 |
| 3 | 5d bd 01 0f 06 03 03 |
5d bd 01 00 00 00 00 |
| 4 | 5d b5 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 |
5d b5 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 |
| 5 | 5d b4 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 |
5d b4 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 |
I'll spare you the headache: request number 3 is different. Now, if we cross reference the different bytes in that with power.rs from the asusctl project, we can see that the 0f 06 03 03 are correctly set in accordance to what we'd expect from the config.
From the same project, we can also see that request 1,4 and 2,5 are called LED_APPLY and LED_SET. The first request (0th) seems to be the AuraEffect packet data.
And this is where my journey ends for now, got what I wanted after all.
After some digging around, I remembered there was a rogauracore project, which supposedly allowed people to change the brightness of the keyboard backlight. That didn't work, however I thought that perhaps the packets might be similiar, and so I found out this packet sequence. Cross referencing it with the asusctl project, we can see that in usb.rs I somehow missed aura_brightness_bytes.
And so, if that packet is sent over (with correct brightness being 0-3 inclusive), the the backlight works, yay.