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by matheusmoreira 952 days ago
> With the TUXEDO Control Center you are able to control the performance and the behavior of the fans by yourself.

I remember seeing this project years ago when I tried to reverse engineer my own laptop's fan control functions.

https://github.com/tuxedocomputers/tuxedo-control-center

I actually tried to make it work on my laptop back then. Didn't succeed unfortunately.

I'd really enjoy reading about how they figured out the power management and fan control stuff. I couldn't figure it out. Did they have to reverse engineer? As a manufacturer, do they have access to documentation? I emailed Clevo asking for documentation and they didn't send me anything helpful.
1 comments
boudin 952 days ago
I can't really confirm if it's the place to look at, but the tuxedo control center works in pair with their kernel module https://github.com/tuxedocomputers/tuxedo-keyboard

As the name wrongly imply, it is not just about controlling the keyboard. At least on my laptop (an aura15 gen 2), a whole chunk of the control center is not available when the module is not loaded. Not sure if it will help but you might want to look into this module as well for your investigation.

link
matheusmoreira 952 days ago
Oh yeah, I remember that now. Back then I looked up those UUIDs on my laptop but none matched. The keyboard features are also different: they're implemented via ACPI on the Tuxedo laptops and via USB control messages on mine.

It's weird. There's all this Clevo ACPI/WMI stuff in those headers but when I dumped my laptop's DSDT tables there was nothing like that. I found some WMI code in there, ran them through a decompiler I found in a GitHub repository and just got back some empty stub code. I still feel disappointed about it.

https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/DSDT

It's really cool that they added sysfs LED controls. I remember looking into that as well. I was planning to send USB LED driver to the kernel but while reading kernel dricer source code and mailing lists to learn how to do it I came across comments saying they prefer to keep stuff in user space whenever possible.

This is my driver in case anyone's interested:

https://github.com/matheusmoreira/ite-829x

I just remembered something else. They used to be on bitbucket instead of github. In 2018 I messaged them there.

https://bitbucket.org/tuxedocomputers/clevo-xsm-wmi/issues/4...

They asked me to email them. I did and they actually sent me the control center software before they released it and also some details about how they were interfacing with the laptop's embedded controller. I still have those emails, they were very helpful. Very nice company and people.

link