existdissolve / keyboardr

Some experiments for Steel Series keyboard

keyboardr

I recently got a SteelSeries APEX M750 keyboard. Besides being delightfully clackety, it has each-key-addressable LEDs. The SteelSeries Engine includes a built-in webserver to which you can HTTP-POST events and trigger custom code-defined routines for illuminating specific keys, managing flash rates, etc.

I decided to integrate this with Slack. In this experiment, when my user is "@" mentioned in a specific Slack workspace, it will trigger an event and do the following:

• Illuminate the number row, "q" row, "a" row and "z" row with one of the 4 main Slack icon colors
• Cycle these 4 colors in a circle of pairs on the keypad
• Flash the keypad "5" intermittently...it's the "S" of the Slack logo, get it? :)

Here's what it looks like:

I started by using the pure JSON-handler approach, but found it to very limited. You can achieve similar results, but it's quite slow and you don't have fine-grained control over the order/timing in which keys are illuminated.

So I moved to using the GoLisp handlers. Wow. GoLisp is just terrible. Imagine the worst parenthesis hell, and then double it. And then set it on fire.

I finally hacked together something that works, but it feels gross. The docs are pretty sparse, so it's hard to really find answers to how to do things better, so 🤷

Anyway, if you want to try this out yourself, clone this repo and then do the following:

Install SteelSeries Engine 3

Obviously, this all assumes you have a relevant keyboard from SteelSeries :) Go ahead and install Steel Series Engine 3 from here: https://steelseries.com/engine

config.js

Add a config.js to the root of this project. In here, export an object that looks like so:

export default {
    user: 'some_user_name',
    workspace: 'some_workspace',
    token: 'some_legacy_token'
}

The "token" can be generated here:

https://api.slack.com/custom-integrations/legacy-tokens

slacker.lsp Symbolic Link

Add a symbolic link for the slacker.lsp file to the hax0rBindings folder in the SteelSeries Engine 3 installation. For example:

ln -s ~/keyboardr/slackr.lsp "/Library/Application Support/SteelSeries Engine 3/hax0rBindings"

Adjust as needed for your environment

Run This App!

Start up this app via npm start. Now @mention yourself (or have someone else do it!) in Slack. You should now see the pretty!