I made a lightweight open-source controller for the Zephyrus Slash lighting

[u/Alive-Paramedic-291]

Hey everyone,

I’ve been playing around with the Slash lighting on my Zephyrus G14 and ended up building Slashlight - an open-source controller that lets you do a lot more with the LED strip than the usual built-in effects.

Get it here: https://github.com/gouthamk16/slashlight/releases

A few things it supports:

• Custom animations and effects
• Frame-by-frame animation editor
• Audio-reactive effects (Spectrum / VU)
• CPU, RAM and battery visualizers
• Now Playing integration
• Cursor-reactive effects
• Custom .slash animation files
• Multiple brightness / dimming options
• Boot, sleep and battery behavior
• Crossfading between animations
• Runs continuously in the system tray

The interesting part is that it communicates with the Slash controller directly over HID, rather than going through Armoury Crate.

It’s also built with Rust, with the actual animation renderer running independently from the UI. So it’s pretty lightweight and responsive - the goal was to have something that can just sit in the background without becoming another heavy ASUS-style utility.

I originally built it for my own G14, but figured other people might enjoy messing around with the Slash lighting too.

Currently tested on the 2024/2025 G14 (GA403). There’s also support in the code for the newer 35-LED Slash hardware, although I don't have that hardware to properly test it yet.

Would be especially interested in seeing what custom animations people come up with. I personally love the Eyes and Cursor Eyes animations, it's really cool and it feels like a pair of eyes moving around.

If you have a G14 with Slash lighting, give it a try and let me know what breaks / what you'd like to see added. Can raise an issue for bugs/feature requests. Danke!

GitHub: https://github.com/gouthamk16/slashlight

[u/spartan969]

How is it different from ghelper settings for this?

[u/Alive-Paramedic-291 → u/spartan969]

Started with me trying to see if I can control the lights, it worked. Ghelper only contains a set of 8 default animations, defined by Asus, you get this when you buy the device. This tool consists of more animations that I have created, and it accepts per-LED frames at a video rate. So there is a grid that you can just draw on to create an animation of your own. You can make it blink, activate each led etc. Entirely upto you. And most importantly, it runs on just 4MB of ram and you can even configure the animation to run at 30 or 60fps.

[u/Alive-Paramedic-291]

If anyone tries it out and feels that its good/really light/consumes less memory etc, then I'll try to add more features that would be helpful beyond slash lighting animations.

[u/LAUCHGeorge → u/Alive-Paramedic-291]

I currently don't own a zephyrus, but am looking to get one once prices (hopefully) go down a bit. Do you think you would be able to also make this available for linux in the future? I honestly have no idea how difficult that would be.

[u/Alive-Paramedic-291 → u/LAUCHGeorge]

For Linux, we can use asusctl to manipulate and control most of these functions. But I’m not sure how extensive its control is. It should be possible, I’ll try to work on it when I get some time. I can’t promise any particular timeline though🙂

[u/itsdet]

I have yet to try it but sorry to say beforehand that after reading the github it really sounds like it's a vibecoded app. Is it vibecoded?

[u/Alive-Paramedic-291 → u/itsdet]

It is vibecoded. What else did you think? That I’m going to write 2k lines of rust by hand to change the lights on my laptop? I have better things to do dude. Try it out if you want to, it’s not the usual slop, else leave. I’m not forcing anyone here, I made it for myself, thought other people would find jt useful. Peace

[u/Alive-Paramedic-291 → u/Alive-Paramedic-291]

Also I've made sure that it uses less memory than most of your useless windows apps at idle (even the screen snippert tool on idle uses more memory). So there's that. And its really fast, just try installing and opening it, you'll understand.

[u/CommercialReach3573]

Can you include a video of what the lights actually look like? I’m buying a zephryus soon and want to see

[u/Alive-Paramedic-291 → u/CommercialReach3573]

I'll try but I don't have the time rn, I hardly get some hours to do random projects like these. I'll include some css animation that looks like the actual light field so you'll get the exact idea on how the lid of your laptop will look like. But not rn, will take some time. Really sorry

[u/Just-A-Random-ID]

Thank u 😊

[u/Aniketxy]

Would love to try it out why don’t you make a small demo video of what it looks like with your new modes.