Ergodox EZ: lights flash repeatedly when connected to shut-down Windows computer

[adiabatic]

All this testing was done with three machines:

• spreadthinly, an iMac12,2 dual-booting OS X and Windows 10 (my main machine)
• paddedontheinside, a machine running Windows 10
• bluehal, a ProLiant MicroServer running FreeBSD

I've noticed that my Ergodox EZ will flash its three lights in quick succession (first red, then green, then blue in a sort of wave) at weird times. This multicolored flash, which I'll call "rainbowing", happens repeatedly, while the computer is off, if I shut my computer off directly from Windows 10.

Ordinarily this would be harmlessly cute, but I sleep in the same room as the keyboard and I don't want to have to either reboot into OS X just to make the blinkenlights stop shining.

Here's what I've noticed after a bit of experimentation:

• The keyboard rainbows repeatedly during the boot-up procedure on spreadthinly. The rainbowing stops before the pick-a-drive screen comes up when you hold alt.
• when shutting down in Windows, you see a rainbow once, even before the hard drive parks.
• I shut spreadthinly off from Windows and the keyboard started rainbowing. I then unplugged it, and it stopped rainbowing (no surprise there). I then plugged the keyboard into a shut-off Windows machine (paddedontheinside) and it started rainbowing again. Finally, I plugged the keyboard back into spreadthinly and it started to rainbow again.
• I shut spreadthinly off from OS X. I then plugged the keyboard into paddedontheinside while the latter was off and it rainbowed only once.
• While spreadthinly was in OS X, I unplugged the keyboard and plugged it into the turned-off Windows machine (paddedontheinside). The keyboard started rainbowing repeatedly. I then plugged the keyboard into bluehal and the rainbowing didn't start up again.
• If I unplug and replug my keyboard into paddedontheinside, it'll stop blinking and resume blinking. Same thing with spreadthinly.

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Is there anything else I can do to have my keyboard not flash lights at me when I shut down straight from Windows in the evening?

[jackhumbert]

Do you have your firmware on github? There are some Makefile options to mess around with, namely SLEEP_LED_ENABLE. This really sounds more like the keyboard power cycling, though. If you look in ergodox_ez.c, you can remove ergodox_blink_all_leds(); from matrix_init_kb, and this should stop.

[adiabatic]

Do you have your firmware on github?

Yup!

If I stick SLEEP_LED_ENABLE = no in …/ergodox_ez/keymaps/zweihander-osx/makefile.mk, will it get picked up automatically by the typical make clean && make KEYMAP=zweihander-osx invocation?

[jackhumbert]

Yeap! :)

[ezuk]

@adiabatic did it do the trick?

[ezuk]

And thanks @jackhumbert!

[adiabatic]

Yup, that did it. Thanks, @jackhumbert!