Lights support for generic Amazon keyboard

Trouble with Synthesia, your keyboard, or adapter? Think you found a bug?
When describing problems, always mention your OS and game version (shown at the bottom of the title screen).

If your keyboard has USB or MIDI ports, there is a tremendously high chance (>99%) it will work with Synthesia. See what you'll need on the keyboards page.
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yingted
Posts: 1

Post by yingted »

I'm testing out a Vangoa keyboard, one of the US$100-US$200 generic keyboards off Amazon. They seem to have the same control module, a variable number of keys, Bluetooth, and some have lights.

Example products:
88 keys, folding, lights, 10-day shipping, US$151.99: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B09LXLQZ5M
88 keys, folding, lights, one-day shipping, US$179.99: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0987BNGS5

They're advertised as working with POP Piano, using its "Universal Keyboard Lights" driver. Unfortunately, lights do not work out of the box with Synthesia.

The keyboard exposes two Bluetooth devices, GZUT-MUSIC, an audio device, and GZUT-MIDI, a MIDI device.
On its MIDI input, the low channels all get synthesized. Channel 10 is sound effects, and lights are switched on/off with the following:
SysEx 0x4d 0x4c 0x4e 0x45 pitch 0x02*is_on
That is, SysEx with a 6-byte data, "MLNE" followed by a pitch and a value byte. Sending 0 turns the light off, sending 1 or 2 turns it on.

One quirk is that the BLE-MIDI timestamp high bits need to be set to 0, or neither synthesizing nor lights work. Most MIDI stacks seem to do this, but bluez on Linux does not.

I tested on Windows, Android, and Linux. Lights aside, it works okay on Windows, but sometimes crashes. Android needs a special BLE-MIDI to MIDI app, and the latency is bad. Linux also needs a BLE-MIDI to MIDI app, but you can recompile bluez with --enable-midi instead. If you use bluez, you also need to zero the timestamp high bits (or just all timestamp bits) in midi.c or the device will ignore it.
Nicholas
Posts: 13132

Post by Nicholas »

yingted wrote: 12-06-21 11:29 am... it works okay on Windows, but sometimes crashes.
What crashes? The keyboard?
yingted wrote: 12-06-21 11:29 am... in midi.c
Which midi.c? Which source code are you using?
yingted wrote: 12-06-21 11:29 am... lights are switched on/off with the following...
I foresee the list of different proprietary key light communication methods growing longer and longer over the years. :grimace:
Nicholas
Posts: 13132

Post by Nicholas »

Sorry for the eight month wait on this. :?

I've tried to search for an official source of documentation for the SysEx message you described, but haven't been able to turn anything up. Even so, I went ahead and implemented it using the (very clear) description you provided, and it's available to test in the latest Synthesia 10.9 beta. If you choose "Proprietary 3 / Vangoa" from the Key Lights menu of an output device, hopefully the lights will work now.

Please let me know. Thanks!
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