Build your own SignalRGB lighting effects from your own pictures — not just geometric shapes.
SignalRGB can play effects but not create them. The community tools that exist only handle shapes; nothing lets you turn a photograph into lighting. SignalForge does.
A SignalRGB effect is a 320x200 web page. SignalRGB overlays your device layout and samples the colour under every LED. So any picture you can draw becomes lighting — your own photos included.
- Pictures as the effect itself (
png,jpg,webp,gif,bmp): dropped in, cropped on the stage, fitted the way you choose. - Shapes — circle, ring, star, heart, triangle, hexagon, diamond, cross, moon — with size, position, rotation and a zoom that breathes.
- Gradients in five shapes (linear, radial, conic, stripes, waves) and flat colours.
- Particles: four patterns, up to four hundred of them, from seeded noise, so the same effect draws the same picture every single time.
- Several layers per effect, stacked and reordered in a layer list.
- Motion: warp, drift, spin, pulse, breathe, zoom — and a wake that trails behind moving things.
- Colour over time: hue rotation, and a cycle through colours you pick.
- A live preview that is the same engine the exported effect runs, so what you see is what SignalRGB plays.
- Your own tile picture for the effect, and your name on it.
Each layer is a picture, a shape, a gradient, a flat colour or a swarm. Reorder them, hide them, remove them — the preview follows every change immediately.
What you set here becomes a slider inside SignalRGB, so the effect stays adjustable after you have installed it.
Not a missing feature — a wall. SignalRGB runs effects in a browser engine built
without media support: asking a <video> element to play there answers
TypeError: v.play is not a function. An effect cannot play a video clip, and no
amount of work on this side changes that.
What is possible in principle is turning a clip into frames beforehand and playing those back inside the effect. That is a real feature nobody has built here yet, and it is not the same thing as "supports video" — the frames would have to fit in the effect file, which is a hard budget. Until somebody builds it, treat video as out of scope.
Node 20 or newer, then:
npm install
npm start
npm test runs the suite. npm run dist builds a Windows installer into
release/.
The installer is not code-signed — signing certificates cost money this project does not have. Windows SmartScreen will therefore warn you the first time you run it ("Windows protected your PC"). That warning means "nobody paid for a certificate", not "this is malware". Choose More info → Run anyway, or build it yourself with the two commands above.
Comments here and there point at files under .superpowers/ — build plans and
measurement reports written while the program was being built. They are not in
this repository: they are instructions and working notes addressed to the
people and tools that did the building, they name paths on the machine they were
written on, and they say nothing a reader of the code needs.
Where such a reference appears, everything needed to understand the code is in the comment beside it; the reference only records where the measurement or the decision originally came from. Nothing is hidden — nothing is missing either.
GPL-3.0-or-later, with one additional term under GPL section 7(b): the author attribution has to stay.
- Full licence text:
LICENSE - The additional term, and what it means in plain words:
ADDITIONAL-TERMS.md
In short: use it for anything, change it, share it, sell what you build with it. If you pass the program or a changed version on, keep it open source and keep the line that says who wrote it — beside your own name, not instead of it.
The name "SignalForge" and the app's icon are not covered by the licence. Fork the code freely; give your fork its own name.
Effects you build with SignalForge are yours — the licence puts no obligation of any kind on them.
Copyright (C) 2026 Max Leopold Blumenschein
SignalForge is an independent community project. It is not made by, endorsed by, or affiliated with WhirlwindFX or SignalRGB. It writes standard effect files into the folder SignalRGB reads; it does not modify SignalRGB itself.