Sending an effect without transitions bricks the backlight

After trying to create and use an effect through a configuration file, I completely lost the ability to have keyboard backlight, following an hidapi error :

• There is no more lights working
• Fn key use to light up the function keys, but it doesn’t anymore
• Even the power button stays orange when it should be white.

At first reboot, the SteelSeries keyboard wasn’t showing up in lsusb. It started showing up again after a full shutdown. I tried to update the UEFI BIOS firmware (following the MSI instructions) to see if it would reset the keyboard but it did not.

Here is the configuration file that made my keyboard crash and triggered the hidapi error (sorry I did not logged it and I can’t make it appear again) :

all steady ff0000
arrows steady 0000ff
numpad steady 00ff00

effect test
  start ffffff
  wave 0 0 x 100 out
end

all effect test

My laptop model is a MSI GE65 Raider 9SE

My system is 5.3.7-arch1-1-ARCH x86_64 GNU/Linux

My msi-perkeyrgb version is 1.4_effects_alpha, built from the AUR this morning (which shows a bump to version 2 normally)

The SteelSeries keyboard is showing in lsusb as Bus 001 Device 004: ID 1038:1122 SteelSeries ApS SteelSeries KLC

And finally, greping SteelSeries in dmesg give me :

[    2.689366] usb 1-9: Product: SteelSeries KLC
[    2.689367] usb 1-9: Manufacturer: SteelSeries
[    2.690642] hid-generic 0003:1038:1122.0004: hiddev2,hidraw3: USB HID v1.11 Device [SteelSeries SteelSeries KLC] on usb-0000:00:14.0-9/input0
[    2.691132] input: SteelSeries SteelSeries KLC as /devices/pci0000:00/0000:00:14.0/usb1/1-9/1-9:1.1/0003:1038:1122.0005/input/input13
[    2.747859] hid-generic 0003:1038:1122.0005: input,hidraw4: USB HID v1.11 Device [SteelSeries SteelSeries KLC] on usb-0000:00:14.0-9/input1

When I now use msi-perkeyrgb, it doesn’t output anything.

Did you happen to stumble on such issue ? Does anyone knows a way to solve this ?

Let me know if you need more information

[TauAkiou]

I’m still communicating with SteelSeries over this; no updates thus far, but I hope we can find a solution and fix the broken keyboards.

I’m going to continue work on the Effects engine, but I’m keeping it in my fork until we can fix these keyboards and make sure it doesn’t happen again. I’m still holding hope that we can find a solution to this.

[rodolpheh]

MSI says they can’t support that, SteelSeries says to contact MSI because they don’t do anything, only the SteelSeries Engine software (which according to a recent article on Gizmodo, is a piece of junk with security holes). I think it’s not worth trying to get help from either of them.