kbrgb

RGB keyboard control for the Acer laptops where nothing else works: the 2025-era Predator and Nitro models that moved their keyboard lighting to an ENE KB5130 chip (ENEK5130 on i2c-HID). Built on a Predator Helios Neo 16S AI (PHN16S-71), confirmed on other machines since, see supported hardware.

One Python file, no dependencies, no kernel module. 29 software effects, the EC's own builtin effects, per-zone static colors, a preset picker, theme sync and boot restore. Coexists fine with Linuwu-Sense fan control.

kbrgb ff2a2a                 # all zones static red
kbrgb ff0000 00ff41 0066ff ff00ff   # per-zone colors
kbrgb storm                  # night sky with lightning strikes
kbrgb prism                  # ripple that shifts hue every sweep
kbrgb battery                # 4 zones become a live battery bar
kbrgb -b 40 -s 6 aurora      # dim, slow northern lights
kbrgb native wave            # the EC's builtin rainbow wave, zero CPU
kbrgb off

Why this exists

I put Linux on this laptop and found out the keyboard RGB was unreachable. DAMX, Linuwu-Sense, facer: they all talk to Acer's WMI interface, and on this hardware generation the firmware accepts every call (AE_OK) and then does nothing. The LEDs never change because they aren't wired to WMI anymore. The real controller is a separate ENE KB5130 chip on i2c-HID (ENEK5130:00, VID 0CF2 PID 5130, shows up as /dev/hidrawN) and it only listens to 11-byte HID feature reports.

The HID protocol was first cracked by the community, see cleyton1986/predator-sense (hid_rgb.rs) and the Linuwu-Sense issue threads. kbrgb reimplements it in userspace Python, puts a software animation engine on top, and can also trigger the EC's builtin effects directly.

Along the way this repo picked up some protocol findings of its own, all verified on real hardware (details and packet layout in PROTOCOL.md):

1. The brightness byte goes 0 to 100 on this EC revision, not 1 to 15 like older tools assumed. A tool sending 15 as "max" is quietly running your LEDs at 15% brightness. Reported upstream and fixed in predator-sense v0.2.27-preview.
2. The all-zones mask 0x0f misbehaves Correction: 0x0f works fine. The original claim was my own test artifact (the packet went out at brightness 15), caught thanks to an independent probe report in issue #1. Full story in PROTOCOL.md, kept there as a warning about single-variable testing.
3. The controller has no persistent memory. Full power off and it wakes up in its builtin rainbow wave, which is why there's a boot restore hook.
4. The EC's native effects are triggerable. Byte 2 of the packet, which everyone had written down as "unknown, constant 0x02", is actually the effect selector. Discovered by abduvaliy-hbai in DAMX PR #213, confirmed here on a PHN16S-71. One write and the hardware animates by itself, zero CPU.

Install

Arch, CachyOS, EndeavourOS, omarchy (AUR):

yay -S kbrgb           # or kbrgb-git to track main

Anywhere else (pip):

pipx install kbrgb                        # or: uv tool install kbrgb
sudo "$(command -v kbrgb)" install-udev

pip cannot write a udev rule, so that second command lays it down. The $(command -v kbrgb) is not decoration: pipx installs into ~/.local/bin, which sudo's secure_path excludes, so a bare sudo kbrgb would not be found.

From source (any distro, needs Python 3.11+ and nothing else):

git clone https://github.com/shwetankg07/kbrgb
cd kbrgb
sudo ./install.sh      # installs kbrgb to /usr/local/bin + udev rule
kbrgb rainbow          # no sudo needed after install

All three paths get you the udev rule, which grants device access to whoever is at the keyboard (uaccess), so everything runs as your normal user. If the keyboard still wants sudo right after installing, replug it or reboot once so the rule takes effect.

Effects

Calm	Motion	Drama	Functional
breathe [C]	snake [C]	storm	cpuheat, a CPU temp gauge
aurora	meteor [C]	eruption	battery, a live charge bar
ocean	wave	supernova	load, CPU left / GPU right
lava	duel [C1 C2]	redalert [C]	netpulse, live network meter
candle	shadow [C]	shockwave [C]	clock, hue follows the time
ripple [C]	chase [C]	glitch [C]	pomo [MIN], pomodoro timer
heartbeat [C]	rainbow	police [C1 C2]
prism		disco / sparkle [C..]
		matrix / fire / strobe [C]

And five that react to your typing:

Reactive	What it does
typewriter [C]	every keystroke glows the whole board, decays back
keyflash [C]	the zone under each key flashes and spills sideways
wpmheat [WPM]	typing speed as color: idle blue to red at your ceiling (default 96 WPM)
zen [C]	static color that fades out after -s idle seconds; any key wakes it
flow [WPM]	wpmheat + zen combined: speed heat that falls asleep when you do

Flags: -b N for brightness (0 to 100), -s N for the cycle period in seconds. Colors are optional RRGGBB hex. When you don't give any, effects pull colors from the active omarchy theme if there is one, with sane fallbacks otherwise.

Reactive effects and privacy

The reactive effects read key events from /dev/input, which requires your user to be in the input group (sudo usermod -aG input $USER, then log out and back in). Keycodes are used in-memory for timing and zone math only — nothing is ever stored, logged, or sent anywhere. If you run keyd or kmonad, events are read from the remapper's virtual keyboard, so these effects keep working there too. load reads the NVIDIA dGPU only while it's already awake — it will never wake a suspended card (or hang on one).

These are software effects: a tiny daemon streams frames to the controller (~14 per second, the chip handles far more without complaint). They survive suspend, the daemon just reopens the device if the i2c bus blips.

If you'd rather have the hardware do the work, kbrgb native breathe|neon|wave|zoom|meteor|twinkle [C] switches the EC to one of its builtin animations. Single write, zero CPU afterwards. neon, wave and zoom are hardware color cycles and ignore the color argument, and for natives -s means the EC speed, 0 to 10, and -r reverses the wave (the direction byte only means something there). kbrgb native list prints the map.

Other commands you'll actually use:

• kbrgb demo tours every effect, about 4 seconds each
• kbrgb list prints effect names, handy for scripts and pickers
• kbrgb restore replays the last setting. The controller forgets on power off, so wire this into a boot hook (examples for omarchy and plain systemd are in examples/)
• kbrgb status shows the device path, saved state and daemon state
• kbrgb probe is a guided hardware diagnostic, see below

The examples/ directory also has a walker-based preset picker (kbrgb-menu), a ready-made presets.conf, and omarchy hooks for theme sync.

Troubleshooting

Colors set by other tools (DAMX, scripts) revert after a split second: that's a kbrgb effect daemon repainting every frame. kbrgb off stops it. One animation engine at a time, last writer wins.

Nothing happens at all: check the chip is there,

grep -l ENEK5130 /sys/class/hidraw/*/device/uevent

and that the udev rule landed. Packages put it in /usr/lib/udev/rules.d, install.sh and install-udev put it in /etc/udev/rules.d, so check both:

ls /usr/lib/udev/rules.d /etc/udev/rules.d | grep kbrgb

Or just try once with sudo to rule out permissions.

DAMX integration

If you use DAMX, a patch based on this protocol makes its Lighting tab work on ENEK5130 models, see the PRs linked from Div-Acer-Manager-Max#172. Stop any kbrgb effect (kbrgb off) before driving colors from DAMX.

Supported hardware

Model	Status
Predator Helios Neo 16S AI (PHN16S-71)	✅ confirmed (developed here + independent probe report)
Nitro ANV16S-41	✅ confirmed three times: kbrgb probe report by abduvaliy-hbai in DAMX #213, plus two independent users (CachyOS daily driver + another) in acer-predator-turbo#287
Predator Helios Neo 16 (PHN16-73)	🤞 same chip, static HID confirmed per predator-sense findings
Anything with ENEK5130 in /sys/class/hidraw/*/device/uevent	probably. Please test and report!

Check yours:

grep -l ENEK5130 /sys/class/hidraw/*/device/uevent

Contributing

If kbrgb got your keyboard working, dropping a star helps the next person with one of these laptops actually find this page. Beyond that, the most useful things right now:

• Testers with other ENEK5130 models. Run kbrgb probe: it walks you through a guided diagnostic and prints a paste-ready report for a GitHub issue. That's all it takes to get your model documented.
• Protocol spelunking. The native effects are mapped (PROTOCOL.md), but there are open threads: the init sequence (0xa4, 0x41-0x48) seen in Acer's Windows DLL, the direction byte that seems to do nothing, and reading state back from the chip. A USB/i2c capture from Windows PredatorSense would answer all three at once.
• New effects. An effect is a ten-line pure function that returns 4 RGB tuples per frame. Go wild.

Credits

• cleyton1986/predator-sense, the first working ENEK5130 HID implementation, which this builds on
• 0x7375646F/Linuwu-Sense and PXDiv/Div-Linuwu-Sense, the fan/platform driver ecosystem, and the issue threads where the community mapped this hardware
• JafarAkhondali/acer-predator-turbo-and-rgb-keyboard-linux-module, the original Acer RGB reverse engineering lineage

License

MIT, see LICENSE. The protocol facts belong to the community that dug them up. This repo just tries to write them down properly.