Disable onboard LEDs

[rjbrown99]

Hi, apologies if this has been answered somewhere but I couldn't find it otherwise.

How does one disable the onboard LEDs on the Pine64? I'd like to turn off the power LED, ethernet LED, and anything else that lights up after the system boots. There are various ways of doing this on other ARM boards but none of them appear to work on the Pine64. 

To be clear, I'm looking for a post-boot configuration option likely to be added to an /etc/rc.local script, or a pre-boot option passed as an option to the booting kernel. 

Something like this article describes for the RPi:
https://www.jeffgeerling.com/blogs/jeff-...spberry-pi

Thanks!

[MarkHaysHarris777]

How does one disable the onboard LEDs on the Pine64? I'd like to turn off the power LED, ethernet LED, and anything else that lights up after the system boots. 

The on-board power LED of the PineA64+ is connected via resistor(s) directly to the DC/DC1 power output of the AXP803 Power Management Integrated Circuit (PMIC). This pin provides the 3v3 output for Nand/eMMC/SDcard/wifi-IO and is also the primary way the PMIC communicates with the outside world that the pine board is properly powered. 

You have three ways of disabling this LED>  1) break the land to the LED, 2) remove the LED, 3) remove the ballast resistor in-line with the LED.  The better way to get what you want here is to block the light with a small piece of black electrical tape (maybe two layers thick).

The eth0 indicator lights can ofc be covered with black electrical tape to darken them if necessary.

No, there is no post bootup way to configure them off (that I am aware of).

[pfeerick]

No, there is no post bootup way to configure them off (that I am aware of).

That's what I like about the Orange Pi Zero... the ethernet leds blink three times when the board is powering up (but just stay on if there is no SD card in), but I don't know if that is something to do with the ETH chip starting up, or some magic going on there in the orange pi uboot. That sort of thing would have helped with diagnostics a LOT on the pine64... as all the pine64 board have ethernet ports with LEDs i.e. If the lights come on, then there's power... if they don't blink... then the card is blank or not a pine64 image

[xalius]

While the power LED can only be turned off by hardware modifications, I am pretty sure you can reprogram the behavior of PHY leds through the linux kernel driver. The Realtek PHY usually allows control of the LEDs in automatic mode or in a more GPIO style fashion.

[rjbrown99]

Thanks for the input, sounds like ol' fashioned electrical tape is the way to go with this one.