ASUS Aura control for RGB lighting with a Hackintosh?

[Deleted member 2311103]

So, the only aura leds are on those fans? The motherboard itself does not have any leds?

 

[ModMike]

The motherboard has LEDs and one 5V adressable RGB header that is connected to the fans. I am not using the 12V LED header.

 

[Deleted member 2311103]

@ModMike are you able to take a high quality photo of your motherboard, at least on the side with the chipset, or maybe have one handy?

 

[ModMike]

@ModMike are you able to take a high quality photo of your motherboard, at least on the side with the chipset, or maybe have one handy?

I would need to dismantle my whole computer but if you can tell me what information you are after, I can usually track just about anything that is publicly available..

The MB has a row of LEDs at the bottom that are controlled via USB. I say that because I never got the I2C to appear, but got them working using the Windows version of openRGB. It was flaky and I had to use WinUSB installed with Zadig. My USB device tree seems to confirm that the MB LEDs are USB:

I did contribute some minor code to VirtualSmc for the Nuvoton. Below are the definitions I created and coded into VirtualSMC.

Nuvoton: Fan Registers

NCT6795D 0xD352 0x4C0, 0x4C2, 0x4C4, 0x4C6, 0x4C8, 0x4CA

NCT6796D 0xD423 0x4C0, 0x4C2, 0x4C4, 0x4C6, 0x4C8, 0x4CA, 0x4CE

NCT6797D 0xD451 0x4C0, 0x4C2, 0x4C4, 0x4C6, 0x4C8, 0x4CA, 0x4CE

NCT6798D 0xD428 0x4C0, 0x4C2, 0x4C4, 0x4C6, 0x4C8, 0x4CA, 0x4CE

NCT679BD 0xD42B 0x4C0, 0x4C2, 0x4C4, 0x4C6, 0x4C8, 0x4CA, 0x4CE


The following may also be useful:

 

[Deleted member 2311103]

It seems that on the motherboard should be an AURA labeled chip responsible with Aura control, can you have a look? If exists i need to know model/version of the chip.
Do you have space on your hdd to install a linux, if so ubuntu 18LTS should do, you will need this in order to prototype the driver for your board under OpenRGB i do not know yet if works or not directly with your MB, did you tested OpenRGB?

 

[ModMike]

It seems that on the motherboard should be an AURA labeled chip responsible with Aura control, can you have a look? If exists i need to know model/version of the chip.
Do you have space on your hdd to install a linux, if so ubuntu 18LTS should do, you will need this in order to prototype the driver for your board under OpenRGB i do not know yet if works or not directly with your MB, did you tested OpenRGB?

I could install Linux but I will leave for another day. I will post back in a few days. Thank you for helping, I am super excited bout getting this working.

 

[ModMike]

It seems that on the motherboard should be an AURA labeled chip responsible with Aura control, can you have a look? If exists i need to know model/version of the chip.
Do you have space on your hdd to install a linux, if so ubuntu 18LTS should do, you will need this in order to prototype the driver for your board under OpenRGB i do not know yet if works or not directly with your MB, did you tested OpenRGB?

Have you seen this I2C kext?

 

[Deleted member 2311103]

Yes, i use this for my touchpad.

 

[CalcProgrammer1]

I'm the lead developer of OpenRGB and I've been following this thread for a while now. I finally got MacOS Catalina set up on one of my test boards, Asus Prime Z270-A. I was able to set up most of my development environment and was able to build my sister project Keyboard Visualizer and run it just fine. KV doesn't access SMBus or USB directly anymore though, so those layers weren't needed to get it up and running.

That's likely where I'm going to get stuck. I know brew has libusb available but I can't figure out how to make Qt Creator/qmake detect that the library and headers are installed (some sort of path issue most likely). I've also looked into VoodooSMBus and VoodooI2C. Neither project exposes the I2C/SMBus host controller to userspace, which is something Linux's drivers do via the i2c-dev driver. I'm a complete MacOS noob, having tinkered with Hackintosh once 10 years ago but that's it. I'm willing to work on the i2c interface but I'm not sure what the best route for exposing generic i2c access (read and write functions, byte/word/block size operations, with or without command byte) from kernel space to user space would be.

There is a ticket open on the OpenRGB GitLab to track MacOS support:

MacOS support / Compilation instructions (#180) · Issues · Adam Honse / OpenRGB · GitLab

Hi there, Is there any chance this is compatible with MacOS? If so, would compilation vary too much?

gitlab.com

 

[Deleted member 2311103]

Hi @CalcProgrammer1 welcome into hackintosh world, i think nobody here it is expert as most of us created their hackintoshes for the first time, at least in while.
I have created macAura which works only with usb devices and was created by sniffing the usb port with wireshark in order to find all commands all commands required by aura device in my laptop.
I think Apple iokit has i2c/smbus interface as well so why not try this way?