My PC's Lights Now Dance to the Bass. Cost: $0.

Gaming PCs ship with RGB lights that do one thing: rainbow. Forever. Like a screensaver that got a job. So I made mine pay attention.

Two Moods

rgb-mood has two moods, and it picks on its own:

• Music playing: the lights pulse with the bass of whatever comes out of the speakers. Spotify, YouTube, a game. The color drifts slowly around the rainbow while the beat does the punching.
• Quiet for a few seconds: the lights glow by the hottest chip in the box. Blue when it's cool, purple when it's working, red when it's cooking. It breathes faster as it heats up.
• RAM: stays solid blue, or flip one setting and it turns into a VU meter.

How It Works

How it works, Tim Urban style: the PC listens to its own speakers (PipeWire), a bit of math (an FFT, via numpy) pulls out the bass 30 times a second, and OpenRGB tells the lights what to do. When it's quiet, it reads the CPU and GPU temperatures instead.

It only runs when I say rgb-mood on. Nothing starts at boot.

Honest Status

Tested on my RAM and motherboard lights. It hears the music and drives OpenRGB. My case fans aren't wired to the motherboard's light header yet, so the full-case demo is coming.

Free tools only: OpenRGB, PipeWire, Python, numpy. One GPU. Zero dollars. Zero excuses.

Code: https://github.com/2db2du-byte/rgb-mood

Everything else I build lives here: https://2db2du-byte.github.io