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> I also thought I’d message the vendor and ask them if they could share any specifications or docs regarding their protocol. To my surprise, Nanoleaf tech support responded to me within 4 hours, with a full description of the protocol that’s used both by the Desk Dock as well as their RGB strips.

How cool is that? Too many vendors still think that they have valuable intellectual property in such relative trivialities. And that handing out the specs freely helps their competitors more than themselves.

I almost had that experience with one of the popular PC liquid cooling hardware vendors around 10 years ago.

I emailed them saying I'd be interested in developing drivers for their hardware for Linux as I was a happy customer and was immediately put in touch with one of the managers and their engineering team.

Made quite a bit of progress before the whole thing was shut down because one of their component vendors threatened them saying it'd be a breach of their contract with them.

Apparently that vendor sold a "datacenter" (non consumer) version of that hardware for which they charged a hefty license fee for the management software (which was Linux compatible).

Jokes on them, someone reverse engineered the whole thing with a USB analyzer years later and published it XD. (not me)

Yeah that part of the article put a big smile on my face.

I did the same thing back in college, when I was in a lab. We wanted to do some research on Wi-Fi signals, and I happened to own a bunch of Wi-Fi adaptors produced by SomeSmallTech Co. Ltd., which featured relatively new Atheros chips and didn't have Linux drivers at the time.

So I sent an email to the company's public email address, asking for some datasheets, "for science". To my disappointment, presumably a PR person replied that they "don't have a company policy to collaborate with academic research". (But they did send a quick reply, kudos to that.)

Funnily enough, years later I ended up working for said company. Naturally, when I first logged into the company network, I searched for the datasheets I asked for. There were "classified" watermarks all over the PDFs :)

It's not the IP, it's sadly how people react. Some folks will be appreciative of help, credit to them. Others will immediately get back how they tried it, it didn't work and now they need you to rewrite everything, or do their project for them, or redesign your product to match what they want it to be. And if you politely refuse, it quickly escalates to threats of trashing your business through every channel, and other things.

So, the safest thing to do is not give details at all, or "leak" them like another reply in this thread mentions.

I had the same reaction. Nano leaf is extremely cool for that.

This has to put them in the top 0.01% of companies that make consumer electronics.

I can think of only a few companies that bother to publish any details... And most of them are focused on industrial customers where it isn't unreasonable to need certain protocol details for integration or even just compliance with certain regulatory systems.

Maybe things are changing?

I have noticed that some of the LED light controllers you see on AliExpress are leaning in to open firmware standards. 5 years ago, you bought the controller and had to flash your own firmware. Now, there's an option at checkout to select an open source firmware. Some even have a USB port built in for flashing!

I have a solar inveter from a company, aparticular German brand. I wanted to use home assistant with it so I needed rs232 data.. tried the support and they asked me to sign an NDA.

Okay, cool. I did with a fake name, address and everything and they sent a file..

Turns out the file is available online.

Facepalm pro Max.

So my question is, what kind of "IP" is in a data sheet that needs protection ? And this isnt even some secret product but a generic solar product sold by millions.

Rs-232 protocol ? Really ?

This is awesome!

But it also makes me a little bit sad. The original parallel port and even ISA interface seemed so simple by comparison, with less layers of abstraction. Just run a wire, and write to a port.

I remember when I was a kid, I found a breakout board in an electronics store's random clearance parts bin, with an ISA header on an edge. On a whim I took it home and wire-wrapped a 7-segment LED onto it. Power and ground were easy. Each segment was hooked to a data line, through a simple buffer IC. I cheated and used only a minimal number of address lines to feed the enable port (guessing through a simple AND gate or something). I was amazed when I wrote to that address and it worked the first time!

I look at a protocol like USB, with hundreds of pages, and instead of that curious excitement and enablement I felt back then, I feel a bit overwhelmed.

I sometimes think about this, starting from scratch with a computer hardware and software stack that disallowed all of the layers of abstraction that have built up over the decades.

Yeah many of the abstractions help with performance but maybe there's value giving up much of that performance in exchange for simplicity.

It’s a userspace USB HID driver in rust, which is honestly more interesting/applicable to me than a kernel driver, which is what I thought it meant from the title.

I really enjoyed the way this post was written, i.e. it includes the code, how it was run, the false paths, etc. You almost get to live through the author's journey and how he figured out just enough to get something working.

I enjoyed this post, but I'm eager to hear what the next step would be for a real "production" userspace driver. Are these typically just daemons that are configured to run at start up? And then some configuration GUI communicates with it over a socket or something?

> Let’s run it again to make sure it was not a fluke!

I understood that reference

The author should probably have implemented support in OpenRGB instead to better benefit others, but this is cool nonetheless.

Excellent post! I have a Nanoleaf 3d thing that I was hoping to use as an ambilight-like thing for the TV, but the experience was... meh. I know about the Hyperion project and hope to set it up one day, but meanwhile I think I could try to repurpose this code to control the strip from a Linux box.

I want to run FreeBSD on my laptop, but they don't have a [complete] driver for my wifi card. I've thought about diving into AI coding-assistant agents just to see if I could use one to finish throwing together a working driver... but figuring out the AI agents is frictiony enough that I'm leaving it be. (I'm not a VSCode user)

Claude code, being a CLI interface, might be more your style? Expensive though

I wish this was done in C so I didn't have to learn Rust. But maybe it is time to learn Rust.

Rust isn't that difficult really. Easier in many ways than C if you're building normal software and not, like, a library of fancy data structures.

Thanks for this. Good read and also kinda inspiring.