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SMBus documentation or instructions


ghost's Avatar
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I remember this hack a while back when the Asus EEE was hot stuff, a dude showed us how to hook up a simple LED to light up the keyboard during night time (or night wardriving, you make the call). The interesting part though was that he hooked this LED up to the SMBus and could by querying (echo) /proc/smb swtich it on and off. I imagine the pins he hooked it up to was a I/O port of some sort but I can't be sure since he didn't really leave any explanation or in-depth documentation. Now I have an old laptop to fiddle around with and was thinking of give this SMBus stuff a try, see if something useful might come out of it. Are there any to be known resources for this kind of interaction, anyone tampered with it before and could perhaps share their experience?

I know you shouldn't tamper to much with low-level hardware since it most likely WILL render your M/B useless if you tamper with in "the wrong way", but since it's an old laptop I don't really care to much for it.


techb's Avatar
Member
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This gives me an idea. Put a pizeo element on the keyboard somewhere, and have the LED's flicker to how hard you hit the keyboard. I know this wouldn't be functional though.

The safest way would be to power the LED's with USB.


ghost's Avatar
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yours31f wrote: Maybe something like this?

http://focus.ti.com/lit/ds/symlink/tca6507.pdf

Interesting enough but I doubt that the Asus EEE has a SMBus like that just to control LED:s. Although it does clarify one thing for me; SMBuses can come in different shapes and capacities.

techb wrote: This gives me an idea. Put a pizeo element on the keyboard somewhere, and have the LED's flicker to how hard you hit the keyboard. I know this wouldn't be functional though.

The safest way would be to power the LED's with USB.

While it can be done, it's definitly not what I'm looking for, just SMBus interaction in general. Like a documentation over the implementation or something.


korg's Avatar
Admin from hell
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You could just run your led to any 5v (Assuming that's what your using) source on the unit, Then install a push button or use one of the keyboard keys as an on-off switch. Done this before and works great. I did find some documentation on the Asus EEE: http://forum.eeeuser.com/viewtopic.php?id=3735


ghost's Avatar
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Yeah that's the hack I was refering to.

Well, I'm not really interested in the LED hack itself but rather the SMBus usage, as you can see in his hack he calls the SMBus from Linux itself. That's more or less what I want to achieve. Thanks for finding it again though korg, might come in handy!