Pi 500+ Power Button Brightness

Support Product Questions
1

Just fired up my 500+ for the first time (yay! :slightly_smiling_face:). Love the mechanical keyboard, so much better than the chiclet keys on the 400 and 500!

My only issue is when the 500+ is in standby the power button is way too bright. I have read the documentation provided on the raspberry pi site but can’t figure out how to reduce the brightness of the power button when in standby mode.

Is it possible to do this?

P.S. the USB c power switch (SKU: CE06575) doesn’t work with the 500+ (I know the description says for pi 4, and I was using it successfully with my pi400), just so others are aware!

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Hi there, @Geoff24861,

After some testing on a Pi 5, not Pi 500+ unfortunately, it seems that this is not possible.

The PWR_LED only has two values, 0 and 1, so there is no way to decrease the brightness.

While there are ways to turn it off from boot such as placing the below lines of code at the end of` /boot/firmware/config.txt:

dtparam=pwr_led_trigger=default-off
dtparam=pwr_led_activelow=on

They only run while the OS system is running. The moment its offline again the electronics take over and the pwr_led stays on until next boot.

Secondly, what do you mean by the Pi 500 not working with the power switch? Are you getting a Low Power error or is the device not turning on?

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That’s unfortunate, I had assumed that it might be possible to control the brightness of the power button in the same way you can control the brightness of the other keyboard keys on the 500+.

I note that you tested with a pi5 and not a pi500+ though, are the power LED’s on the two controlled in the same manner?

To answer your question in regards to the inline power switch, the pi 500+ doesn’t seem to receive power when the inline power switch is connected between the pi’s power supply and the pi itself when the switch is in the on position (the pi’s power button doesn’t indicate standby power nor will the pi turn on). The switch itself is fine as it works with my pi400, but not the pi500+. Note that I’m using the 45W pi psu with my 500+ if that makes any difference.

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Hi @Geoff24861,

From what I can tell from the Official Pi 5 Documentation, it seems that while the Pi 500+ has a lot of additional setting for the RGB lighting, those don’t extend to the power button:

“With the exception of the power button, which is unaffected by any effect, keyboard lighting effects are controlled through the configuration software.”

That seems to suggest that there is not any additional configuration options regarding the Pi 5 Power LED, so it would be controlled the same way as the Pi 5.

Its good to know that the Power Switch isn’t working with the Pi 5. I would be interested to see how it would go with the 27W Power Supply, but I doubt it would make too much of a difference.

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Thanks Jane, I missed that part when I read the documentation, good to know.

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