FlyGlow

Smooth, layered lighting for the Flydigi CD2 charging dock.
Effects in layers, LED-by-LED painting, media and Shadertoy shaders, side by side with Space Station.

Русская версия

Highlights

The CD2 dock has 162 good RGB LEDs, but the effects in Flydigi Space Station look rough: every effect is a fixed 50-frame loop, colours are blended in plain sRGB and fades step through raw 8-bit values. The dock only plays back the frames it receives, so FlyGlow renders better frames and uploads them.

• 21 smooth effects. Aurora, fire, plasma, lava lamp, rainbow waves, ripples, visor, comets, stars, rain, sparkles, fireflies and more. Linear-light rendering, OKLab blending and up to 200 frames per loop: no muddy gradient midpoints, smooth slow fades.
• Preset gallery. Ready-made scenes to start from: superheroes, games, arcade classics, emoji, animals, nature, space, holidays, patterns and calm mood lighting, with previews that play under the mouse. Many presets have a few settings of their own (colours, variants, decorations) at the top of the Inspector. Save your own scenes as presets, add folders such as Downloads to the gallery, and get new presets from the online library without reinstalling.
• Layers like iCUE. Stack effects with Normal, Add, Screen, Multiply or Lighten blending, set opacity, recolour a layer with hue, saturation, lightness, contrast or a tint, shift and speed up its timing, paint the area each layer covers. Pictures (media and painted layers) also get sharpen, blur and glow.
• Filters. A filter layer reworks everything below it. Glitch tears rows sideways, splits the RGB channels, drops in noise blocks and flickers in bursts, with strength, bursts per loop, burst length and seed to set and a seamless loop. Glint sweeps a soft band of light over whatever is lit below, brightening it in its own colour with a touch of the glint's colour, with direction, width, colour, whiteness, strength, passes per loop and sweep time to set. The filter layer's opacity, blend mode and area say how much of the result goes over the original.
• Your own animation. Paint the LEDs directly (size 1 is exactly one LED), set keyframes on the timeline and let FlyGlow interpolate everything in between, smooth, linear or stepped. Select part of the loop on the timeline to play just that part and trim the loop to it.
• Media import. PNG/JPEG, GIF, APNG, WebP and MP4/MOV/M4V/AVI/WMV. Each LED averages its own hex cell of the picture; fit, zoom, pan, rotate, trim and colour controls included.
• Shaders. Paste a Shadertoy-style GLSL mainImage: it runs on the GPU and each LED averages its cell of the frame. A crossfade closes the loop for shaders driven by iTime; iPhase loops by itself. Commented templates to start from (gradients, plasma, noise, shapes, particles, per-LED pixel work, a filter), .glsl files to open and save. With "Process layers below" on, a shader becomes a filter: the layers under it come in as iChannel0, one cell per LED, and several such shaders stacked work as a multipass shader. examples/filters-demo.flyglow shows a shader filter and a glitch over plasma.
• Side by side with Space Station. Uploads go straight to the dock over USB, so Space Station can stay open for the controller and the dock settings.
• Everyday comforts. Undo and redo, .flyglow scenes in tabs (files opened from Explorer join the running window), session autosave, file association, English and Russian UI switchable on the fly, a daily check for a newer release.

How It Works

flowchart LR
    A[Effects and layers] --> B[Composite in linear light]
    B --> C[Bake up to 200 frames<br/>20 ms steps]
    C --> D[USB HID upload]
    D --> E[CD2 dock plays the loop]
    C -. fallback .-> F[Space Station service] -.-> E

Loading

• Rendering. An effect is a pure function of loop phase, so loops are seamless and the preview shows exactly the frames that get baked. Layers are composited in linear light; gradients and fades are mixed in OKLab and follow perceived brightness. A filter layer gets the layers below already composited and is blended like any other layer.
• Baking. The firmware plays uploaded frames and generates nothing itself: up to 200 frames by default (255 configurable), a frame interval in 20 ms steps, 8 bits per channel. The optional "Lift dark tones" raises the darkest tones toward a gamma-2.2 curve while the mids and highs keep the output gamma, so dark fades step less and stay lit, with hues kept; examples/dark-lift-test.flyglow shows it side by side with the plain output.
• Upload. FlyGlow opens the dock's vendor HID interface shared with Space Station's service and writes a Custom lighting config, about 85 ms per frame. If the HID path is unavailable, it falls back to Space Station's own service pipe. An upload rewrites the dock's stored lighting, so it only happens on "Send to dock".
• Protocols. docs/hid-protocol.md covers the direct USB path to the dock, docs/ipc-protocol.md covers Space Station's service pipe.

Installation

Requirements: Windows 10 1809 or later (x64), a Flydigi CD2 dock connected over USB. Space Station is optional.

Package	Notes
FlyGlow-<version>-setup-win64.exe	Recommended. English and Russian setup, installs for the current user without admin rights, optional desktop icon and .flyglow association.
FlyGlow-<version>-portable-win64.zip	Unzip anywhere. Settings and autosave stay in data\ next to the exe.

Both are on the Releases page. Picking any effect in Space Station brings the stock lighting back.

Building from source

Requirements: Visual Studio 2022 with the C++ tools, Qt 6.10 (msvc2022_64), CMake 3.21+, Inno Setup 7 for the installer.

From an "x64 Native Tools" prompt:

cmake -S . -B build -G Ninja -DCMAKE_BUILD_TYPE=RelWithDebInfo -DCMAKE_PREFIX_PATH=C:/Qt/6.10.3/msvc2022_64
cmake --build build

Run build\FlyGlow.exe with Qt's bin folder on PATH.

A Visual Studio solution is generated, not written by hand; F5 then starts FlyGlow with Qt on PATH:

cmake -S . -B build-vs -G "Visual Studio 17 2022" -A x64 -DCMAKE_PREFIX_PATH=C:/Qt/6.10.3/msvc2022_64

packaging\build-release.cmd produces the portable zip and the installer in dist\<version>\; set QTDIR and, if needed, ISCC first. Keep the checkout path short: CMake's try-compile paths hit the Windows 260-character limit under deep roots.

Developer tools built alongside the app:

• effects_check <dir> - checks every effect for NaN, loop seams and harsh steps, and writes PNG previews.
• media_check <file> <dir> - decodes a clip and writes a filmstrip of the sampled LEDs.
• shader_check <shader.glsl> <dir> - compiles a shader like the Shader layer does, prints driver messages and timing, writes GPU frames and the LED result.
• scene_check <scene.flyglow> <out.png> - loads a scene like the app does, validates its preset block and renders loop phases as the dock lights them (preset format: docs/presets.md).
• ipc_probe - read-only queries to Space Station's service; --selftest runs offline.
• FLYGLOW_NO_DEVICE=1 - starts the app without touching the dock.

License and notices

FlyGlow is released under the MIT License.

Component	Notes
Qt 6	LGPL-3.0, linked dynamically; the release ships the unmodified Qt DLLs, which can be replaced.
Microsoft Visual C++ runtime	Redistributed app-locally under the Visual C++ Redistributable terms.
OKLab	Colour space by Björn Ottosson, used for all colour blending.
OpenFlydigi	First public documentation of the CD2 HID protocol.

FlyGlow is an independent project, not affiliated with or endorsed by Flydigi. Flydigi and Space Station are trademarks of their respective owners. Uploading replaces the dock's stored lighting; use at your own risk.