Change Razer Mouse Color
Sometimes it feels like, no matter where you look, PC gaming equipment is festooned with RGB lighting. If you use Razer gear, however, there’s an easy way to control it.If you’re not a fan of gaming’s fascination with multicolor lighting, then I’m going to show you how to shut off all of the LEDs on your Razer hardware. If you are a fan of RGB lights like I am, I’m going to show you how to control any new Razer peripheral that’s compatible with Chroma, Razer’s LED-syncing technology that supports a total of 16.8 million colors. And don’t worry: there are more guides in the works for other PC gaming peripheral brands.This guide will walk you through how to turn Chroma on and off, apply the default presets, use the Chroma Studio, and create your own mini light shows on your keyboard, headset, mouse, gaming mat, or any other Chroma-compatible peripheral.First, here’s a checklist to get started: What You’ll Need. A Razer Chroma-compatible computer or peripheral. Razer Synapse 3, Razer’s hardware management app. (If you are using older hardware that requires Razer Synapse 2, you won’t be able to use the Chroma Studio or similar Chroma effect apps.).
A bit of patienceHow to Get StartedThe first step in controlling your Chroma lighting. This is Razer’s official hardware management application for its devices and peripherals, and it’s one of the best apps you can have pinned to your Windows task bar for quicker access.Once you install Synapse, you’ll be greeted with a login screen where you’ll enter your credentials and arrive at a screen somewhat similar to the one above. If you don’t have an account yet, you can sign up for one.Razer peripherals vary as to which have the widest variety of Chroma effects and detail. In general, they rank in this order: keyboards and gamepads; mice, headsets, and controllers; stands, docks, and adapters.
For demonstration purposes, I’ll test some effects with a, which has per-key RGB lighting and can display a wide variety of Chroma effects.Change Your Light Presets. Using your Synapse 3-compatible Razer keyboard, navigate to and click on the “Lighting” tab. From the “Lighting” tab, you can control brightness (or turn the backlight off completely), set energy-saver modes, and select “Quick Effects” for a preview of the types of light shows you can encounter. Within the “Quick Effects” drop-down menu, you can select any one of the listed effects just to see what they do.
I would suggest that you experiment to find out which effects you like most and keep note of those for later.Prepare to create your own lighting presetsWith some experimentation, you can create your own custom effects. You can even use the defaults as the basis for your own. The following instructions outline some of the basic Chroma Studio controls to give you a better understanding of how to work with your custom Chroma effects.
Navigate to the “Modules” tab in Synapse 3, and download the “Chroma Studio” module. Wait for the download to finish, then restart the Synapse 3 app. At this point, you can start to experiment with lighting effects within the Chroma Studio. Navigate to the “Lighting” tab for your Razer peripheral.
Click on the “Advanced Effects” tab and then on “Chroma Studio.”. You’ll be greeted by a layer-based editor and visual representation of all of your connected Razer peripherals.
You can highlight specific gear by using the left mouse button and dragging to select. The five icons on the toolbar within the editor include: Selector (for highlighting an area of LEDs), Pen (to draw directly on LEDs using the current effect ), Paint Bucket (to fill an area continuously with the current effect), Move (for positioning devices in the editor), and “remove/trash.”. On the left panel, you can see your current effects as well as groups of effects that you’ve created. By grouping effects, you’ll have an efficient and easy way of keeping custom effects organized when you assign them to different peripherals.
The left panel list also includes the “Add Group,” “Duplicate Effect,” and “Delete Effect” buttons. You’ll be using these three to quickly manage, group, or delete any effects you’ve created. If you scroll down on the left sidebar, you’ll also find an “Add Effects” group of preset effects, similar to the ones you saw in “Quick Effects” earlier.Keep in mind that different effects have different custom settings that you can take advantage of. For example, “Spectrum Cycling” can have its duration and colors altered, “Starlight” can have its speed and density changed, and “Wheel” can have its direction, center point, speed, and playback of colors changed. There’s a lot of room for customization. Create your own lighting presets. In the case of the Huntsman Elite keyboard, I’m going to create my own take on the “Fire” effect.
First, highlight the keyboard by clicking the left mouse button and dragging it over. Next, select the “Fire” effect from the left-hand sidebar. Once selected, you’ll notice the right sidebar has a “Hot” and “Cold” option. This is your opportunity to play with color combinations. In this example, I’ve selected a deep blue as the “hot” color and an off-white for “cold.”. Once you’ve made your color selections, hit the green “Save” button on the bottom right. Your changes should appear on your peripheral.
At this point, you can duplicate the effect to apply it to other Chroma-enabled and Synapse 3-compatible devices. You can also right-click on the effect to change its name, duplicate it, or delete it to start fresh.Importing / exporting custom Chroma ProfilesIf you want, you can also share your own custom Chroma profiles with friends or on the web.
Update: Some people requested details on the LED replacement, so I made a new video (on the bottom of this post) to clarify the process.I tried a keyboard with Cherry blue mechanical switches and I loved the feeling, a couple of weeks later I decided to buy one. As I was about to spend 100 euros on a keyboard, I decided that I might as well pay 20 or 30 more and buy one with backlighting.
Backlighting is pretty unimportant on a keyboard, but it does help a bit when using it on dark environments and, let’s be honest, it looks coolAfter searching for a bit, the cheaper peripheral that fitted the requirements that I could find was the Razer BlackWidow Ultimate and it also has extra programmable keys, so I picked one up in a store for 120euro (yes, for some reason razer peripherals are sold with a conversion rate of 1USD to 1EUR). During the day it was almost acceptable but, in darker environments, the blue backlight was really unpleasant. I bought a big bag of 3mm white LEDs on eBay (around 5usd), improvised a keycap remover and replaced the blue LEDs with the white ones. All the blue LEDs were replaced.It looks a lot better and feels a lot less harsh to the eyes in dark environments.Quality-wise the hardware is not bad but I quickly found out the software is atrocious. What Razer calls Synapse 2.0 is one of the most obnoxious pieces of software I’ve erver used. It is large, it required me to login and it crashes half the time (the last one might be because of my environment, but everything else works fine so I won’t lose any time trying to make it work), unfortunately the macro keys, macro recording and, basically, everything macro-related doesn’t work without the software running.
When selecting the backlight brightness with the combination Fn+F12 there are only OFF, DIM, NORMAL, BRIGHT and PULSATING (wich is pretty useless). In the configuration software there is a tab with a sliding trackbar control for selecting the brightness but, after selecting the desired brightness level (wich is updated immediately in the keyboard) and releasing the mouse button, the trackbar jumped to one of the predefined settings and the same happens on the keyboard. Unfortunately for me, I found out that my preferred light level to use at night under fluorescent lighting was between the “OFF” and “DIM” positions.
I emailed razer support and, after a couple of emails, the final answer was:Thank you for your patience.We would like to clarify this further.The lighting option cannot be adjusted to specific level of brightness like you are trying to achieve.You are only able to use the options available – OFF, DIM, NORMAL or BRIGHT.Hope that clarifies the matter, thank you.Well, it became pretty “clear” that I bought a very expensive crappy product.Not one to accept defeat easily I decided to try and implement a custom backlight controller. Fortunately it was easy to understand how they did it. Every LED’s anode is connected directly to +5V from the USB and each individual LED’s cathode has a resistor (470 ohm, if I’m remembering correctly). Eagle schematic.The relay is latching, that means it only needs a quick pulse to change and remains stable without additional current, it is used to switch between the two sources of PWM, the one from Razer’s MCU and the AVR one. Don’t pull it without properly melting the solder, otherwise you will damage the PCB.I used a soldering iron to melt the solder of both pins of each LED at the same time and then I pulled the old LED with small pliers. After all the LEDs were removed I cleaned the holes with solder wick.
You can either use solder wick or a desoldering pump to clean the holes.Then you just need to insert the new LEDs (respecting their polarity, otherwise they won’t light up).If you need I can try and make a video of the process to clarify. To “ac”:Without PWM, with a simple resistor (or potentiometer), the LEDs could draw around 400mA at maximum brightness, that is a lot of current to put through a regular potentiometer. First off kudos to you on the original mod and detailed instructions, beautiful work.
I’m having the same issue as Helmi Limerance, the back light intermittently dims and after some basic troubleshooting appears to be a hardware problem.I’m definitely not shy when it comes to opening the keyboard (I’m a 1st yr elect eng drop out ), and i’m sure I could eventually get my hands on and replace the SOT23 transistor (once I locate it on the board), just curious what else you would think to try if that does not work, or something I could try to isolate the issue without having to solder like looking for a voltage drop somewhere. Before I post this I have to admit, you did some serious work here. If I was confident enough to do what you did I would recolor my whole keyboard! 🙂There is a much easier way to dim the lighting. I have it so dim that I can see the letters but it is not obtrusive to anything that I do; if I’m not looking at the keyboard the lights could be assumed to be disabled, almost.Browse to your profiles for the Black Widow, typically:“C:ProgramDataRazerSynapseDevicesBlackWidow UltimateProfiles”The files here are named so you wouldn’t really guess what they’re for without knowing it’s the profile folder. Open a file and search for and change the number value to 1I would recommend closing Synapse 2.0 while editing this file to make sure it saves; and I would also recommend having a second profile present for when Synapse 2.0 is restarted to load first.
It doesn’t seem to update the 1 if that’s the same profile as it closed with active.Hope this helps those who feel the keys are too bright in the darkness! I also have the Razer Blackwidow Ultimate model# RZ03-0038 and when I first bought it it had several different led colors to choose from. I know for a fact that the led’s are able to emit any color in the spectrum and is only restricted by the software itself which handles the colors.
Hence this mod is really unnecessary for my keyboard. Since the software auto-updates it now only has one color which is blue (the last color I had it set to before it updated). Why in the hell did they remove the option to change the led color? Trust me on this one Dean, you are mistaken, there was no color selection menu, you might be thinking of some of their mice.
The color on the LEDs of your keyboard will definitely not change by software. There are LEDs with multiple colors, but they are completely different than these ones.Read this, especially the “Physics” section:“The wavelength of the light emitted, and thus its color, depends on the band gap energy of the materials forming the p-n junction.”So, unless you change the physical properties of the LED chip, the color won’t change.The only choice you had was to buy the Blackwidow Ultimate in blue, wait for the newer version in green or buy the Stealth edition in Red, there might be other versions, but I’m fairly certain they didn’t make a BW Ultimate with RGB LEDs. Hello, unfortunately, the switches have the holes for the LEDs but unless there is a similar model with backlight, it’s unlikely that the PCB has the LED holes.
Razer Deathadder Expert Color Change
You can disassemble the keyboard and check if it does. If it does, you need to see if it’s powered, solder the LEDs and also replace all the keycaps, the keycaps you currently have probably don’t let light through.Unless you are looking for a weekend project to pass the time, it’s probably easier to sell the keyboard you currently have and buy a backlit one. You would have to spend some money on the new keycaps anyway. Thank you for such a great mod.I have Razer BW 2014 Ultimate and I was a happy user of it. However, today I’ve decided to change my space key switch from Kailh to Cherry MX Green. I have successfully changed it, but when I started to test keys, it turns out that “s”, “window” and “;” are not working. I think that I burned some PCB element or maybe damaged the trace (but I cant figure out how did I manage to do it) during the soldering.
I noticed on the PCB that keys didn’t have trace which connect them with other keys’ pins. Can I remove the trace protector and just directly connect the pins?Also I’ve tried to solder the pins of the broken key with the M3 key pins, but after it when I press M3 key some other keys are activating.Maybe you have the photo of the front of PCB, can you share it? I want to see the elements that placed on it.P.S. Key switches are working, I tested it with continuity checker.