Rainbow Powered Fun

Platform for integrating 3rd party peripherals with game development

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Inspiration

I got a Razer Chroma keyboard and use it for normal work as well as playing during my free time. I was really intrigued by the cool 3rd party applications other people were making--for a keyboard! Fueled by this interest I started researching how I might achieve the same thing and even go further one day.

What it does

It allows the user to choose several different custom lighting effects/options. What's special about this is that it doesn't use the official user software, instead relying on the undocumented SDK that no one seems to know anything about.

How I built it

I started by installing the SDK along with the user software and then moved on to reverse engineering the enormous sample program.

Challenges I ran into

The main challenge I faced was the lack of documentation. There's only one enormous, complicated example program to understand the syntax of the Razer Chroma SDK. I also struggled to understand the vast array of custom objects they use to organize all the different parts of their SDK.

Accomplishments that I'm proud of

I'm proud that I can now program my keyboard to go along with any game I want. I'm also proud I made a fully function C++ program complete with a command-line GUI.

What I learned

I learned more about C++, multithreading, and how to use SDKs.

What's next for Rainbow Powered Peripherals

Make it work with my own game :)

LOLs

So, my "team" (aka my good friends who all did only their own projects) also had fun while we were coding and during the breaks. Here's one specific break where you can see us messing around with the keyboard in development in the background: Here's the cool video :)

Built With

  • c++
  • razer-chroma-sdk
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