Adding Alienware Aurora ACT1250 Support

[LeeThompson]

I know the ACT1250 isn't supported yet (at least not fully). I recently got a new ACT1250 box. (I know there's a similar issue #597 but it's more of a bug report whereas this is observational and trying to provide data to add support.)

Current behavior:

CLI
The CLI tool says the API isn't available; if I do a probe it finds 28 lights (they are all along the side bezel, but not complete), it just stops without discovering them all.

status output:

alienfx-cli v9.6.1.2
Dell API not found, 1 low-level devices found.
Device #0 - [MACHINE NAME], VID#6268, PID#1360, APIv4, 28 lights

GUI
With the GUI tool I can find all of the lights but there are some anomalies. For example: lights 63-65 are all for the Alien head (power button).

Some correct discoveries with the GUI tool:
Light 68 is the rear fan
Light 69 is the CPU (liquid cooling)

Naming the lights in the GUI tool was really awkward, making me think I'm not using it properly (to be fair, I've always been a alienfx-tool cli user).

Conclusions
If there's any additional information I can provide, let me know what I need to do and I'll do it. I would greatly appreciate at the very least cli support so I can change colors easily.

[T-Troll]

Uff... R16 and ACT are a pain.
Do you know why the CLI is limited to 28 (in fact, 26) lights?
It's a command length for the 550/551 chip. And prior to this hardware, no one had even 15 lights...

As you can see, i starting to make some measures for 64+ lights. It's quite not simple, because I have both chips but not this gear.

So you can help by testing. I can increase lights for v4 easily, but the devil is in the control—it seems like I still miss one point in this.

For now... Use the GUI for the set. Use CLI to control. Report issues.

[LeeThompson]

It's actually really weird, The "bezel" area has literally dozens of individual lights but the AWCC's own GUI treats it as a single one. (And I would be happy to treat it as a single one for my own usage.)

[eus]

Hi, I also have got an Aurora ACT1250. Its AW-ELC has VID:PID 187c:0550, which is different from what @LeeThompson has reported.

For this AW-ELC 187c:0550, the latest version of alienfx-cli (9.6.1.2) detects 0 lights.

Anything I can do to help you move faster to support this AW-ELC with VID:PID 187c:0550, @T-Troll ?

[eus]

For your information, @T-Troll & @LeeThompson, using the source code of https://openrgb.org/ that I manually handpicked from the GPL-2.0-licensed code https://gitlab.com/CalcProgrammer1/OpenRGB/-/blob/master/Controllers/AlienwareController/AlienwareController.cpp?ref_type=heads and compiled on Ubuntu 24.04 using "cc -I /usr/include/hidapi -lhidapi-libusb" after installing the Ubuntu package "libhidapi-dev", I see that my AW-ELC that has VID:PID 187c:0550 has its firmware at version 1.1.10 and its platform ID being 0x0811 with the number of zones being 70 zones. By the same source code, I can control each of the 70 zones individually. So, I really don't know why on Windows 11, the latest version of alienfx-cli (9.6.1.2) detects 0 lights.

[T-Troll]

The 0550 chip is common and supported from the beginning of the tools development.

But read my lips - there is NO KNOW WAY to detect lights connected to the chip. I check the code - he is using hard-coded schemes for every device. I have a detection list in a separate .csv file instead.

So you need to detect lights manually. Better use GUI for this.

Other issue for R16 and ACT - this gear has a lot of lights, but chip commands only support addressing of 26 lights. I make some measures to support more lights in the device at latest releases, but I'm not sure it's enough (I don't have any system with 27+ lights). So this is the place you can help me.

PS: CLI set-one command uses physical light ID instead of logical. You can try to check IDs using it.

[eus]

@T-Troll : I don't get why it should be a problem that "R16 and ACT - this gear has a lot of lights, but chip commands only support addressing of 26 lights." I can activate each of the 70 zones, where each zone should have at least one LED, in my ACT without any problem.

Yes, I did detect each of the 70 zones of my Aurora ACT1250 manually. There is no problem with having more than 26 lights; I can control 70 lights at least, assuming that one zone has at least one light.

So, I guess it is a problem because you want to detect the zones automatically? I have never used your tool before, so I don't really know what your objective is.

My objective is simply to have a non-proprietary way to control my Aurora ACT1250 lights (i.e., without having to install AWCC). If I have to figure out the lights manually, that is fine with me. Anyway, I have got what I want: a very small C code to control my ACT's 70 zones, which encompass the fan lights, the power button lights, and the stadium/bezel lights, thanks to that OpenRGB GPL-2.0-licensed code; later on I found out that the original reverse-engineering effort is by kmescher on trackmastersteve/alienfx#41 (comment).

Is giving you the mapping between a zone number XY given in the USB HID command "00 03 23 01 00 XY" to the zone that physically lits up on the ACT1250 the help you need with Aurora ACT1250?

[T-Troll]

The chip inside ACT supported already. You can use both GUI or CLI to first set up lights, then use it. If something doesn't work correctly, let me know.

In case you want your code, you can use mine SDK from this project and write logic yourself.

PS: 03 23 have more complex interface, in fact.

[eus]

@T-Troll: Something that does not work correctly with your tool is the fact that for my "AW-ELC 187c:0550, the latest version of alienfx-cli (9.6.1.2) detects 0 lights." But, it was a problem before I found out anything about the OpenRGB code whose original reverse-engineering effort was made by kmescher (trackmastersteve/alienfx#41 (comment)). Now I don't have that problem anymore because I simply use my own tool.

Anyway, if you know that "03 23" can control more than 26 lights individually through AW-ELC 187c:0550, why did you write "R16 and ACT - this gear has a lot of lights, but chip commands only support addressing of 26 lights"? What chip commands did you refer to?

[bhoult]

Another ACT1250 data point, same controller as @eus: AW-ELC 187c:0550, firmware 1.1.10, config report 08 11 46 (platform 0x0811, 70 zones). I'm driving it from Linux with hidraw feature reports (OpenRGB's protocol). Here's what I confirmed on hardware, partly in answer to the 26-light question.

Zone map (checked by eye, matches @LeeThompson's)

• 0–59: front ring / bezel
• 63, 64, 65: alien head (power button). It's three LEDs behind one diffuser, so you see their blend; yellow + cyan + magenta reads as white.
• 68: rear fan
• 69: CPU cooler (AIO) ring
• 60–62, 66, 67: nothing visible. The GPU light isn't on this controller.

Controlling all 70 zones

• One select packet 03 23 01 00 NN <ids> with up to 25 ids works, followed by its 03 24 action(s). Covering all 70 zones is just several select+action pairs in one program, e.g. 25 + 25 + 10 for the ring.
• This firmware is roomy. It accepted a 70-pair program (one zone per pair), and 13 pairs with 10 morph actions each (130 actions). The 13-pair cap reported for the Area-51 (187c:0551, fw 0.2.1) in OpenRGB issue #5822 doesn't apply here.
• A program that names any zone id ≥ 70 is rejected whole and the lights don't change. The FINISH_PLAY reply says so: 00 03 21 00 03 ff ff ff … (byte 7 = 0xFF, counting the report id as byte 0), versus … ff ff 00 when accepted.
• Colour 000000 does not turn a zone off. In my tests those zones showed an older stored animation instead (a previously saved pattern bled through as blue/black stripes), so I send 010101 for "off".

Animations

• Chains of morph actions (mode 0x02) loop on the controller with no host process: 7 hues at duration 2000 ms / tempo 100 per step give a smooth spectrum cycle, and rotating the chain for each ring block gives a wave around the ring.
• The live slot 0xFFFF held its pattern for at least several minutes; I saw no revert.

Happy to test things on this machine if it helps.

Worked out with help from Claude Code (an AI assistant); all observations are from my own ACT1250.

The tool is here, with the zone map and these notes in the README: https://github.com/bhoult/alienware-aurora-lighting