qnapctl's Introduction

qnapctl

A tiny system daemon to control and react to QNAP hardware, including:

the panel LCD screen (toggle backlight and change displayed text)
the panel LCD buttons, usually for navigating the LCD display
the STATUS and USB LEDs
the USB COPY button
the disk ERROR LEDs

Also includes a demo program that makes use of the API exposed by the daemon.

Overview

Beware: this was developped and tested exclusively on the QNAP device I own, model TS-453 Pro. This code most likely won't work on different hardware.

TS-453 Pro features:

an A125 LCD panel with a 2×16 char display, backlight and two control buttons
a 4-disk bay, with activity and error LEDs for each of the 4 bays
some extra LEDs: dual-color status (green & red), USB activity and network activity (this one sadly cannot be controlled)

qnapd

qnapd is a C++ (Qt) daemon that:

reads from internal serial device /dev/ttyS1 to intercept LCD button presses (ENTER and SELECT)
writes to internal serial device /dev/ttyS1 to toggle LCD backlight and change LCD text
polls a raw I/O port to intercept USB COPY button presses
writes to a few raw I/O ports to toggle the various front panel LEDs

The daemon receives orders and broadcasts events using the system DBus. The DBus API is self-documented in the XML interface.

qnapctl

qnapctl is a C++ (Qt) program that communicates with qnapd to provide a few basic features:

blinks the green status LED faster or slower depending on load average
blinks the red status LED when there are failed systemd services
displays a few basic info on the LCD display eg. NIC IP addresses, using LCD buttons to navigate the various info