uncoil

The brief

Razer’s Synapse runs the lights and settings on Razer keyboards and mice. On one PC it ran as seventeen processes, started at about 1.4 GB of memory and kept growing, to change the colour of a keyboard.

What I built

uncoil, a small open-source lighting daemon for Razer peripherals on Windows, with a desktop app and a command line beside it.

• One process instead of 17, about 3 MB of memory instead of 1.4 GB, and a 1.4 MB install instead of about 500 MB, measured on one PC, per the project’s README.
• One effect across the whole desk: every LED has a measured position, so a wave runs from the keyboard onto the mouse and the mat as one field.
• Key maps, mouse DPI and the scroll wheel are written to the device’s own memory, so they keep working without uncoil. Every write asks first and is logged.
• No account, no telemetry, no kernel drivers and no network connections. The app talks to the daemon over a local pipe only your account can open.

How it works

The daemon is Rust and speaks the keyboards’ own USB reports, learned from OpenRazer, OpenRGB and Synapse’s own logs, and streams custom frames at up to 30 a second. Adding a device is mostly one data file. The app is Tauri 2 with SvelteKit, and its preview runs the real effect code. The full write-up covers the expensive lessons.

What came of it

uncoil is public and GPL-licensed, with its first release out and three devices tested on real hardware. It’s the kind of work I like most: someone else’s heavy software, rebuilt to do the useful part well.