A small hiatus is good for the mind. This hiatus, however, is over, and its end has brought a new release of Wraith Master. Wraith Master now supports “Enso mode”, a demo mode that was previously inaccessible, and the ability to reset the cooler to its default configuration. In addition, the software now reports the firmware version of your Wraith Prism in the header bar, and resolves some small memory leaking issues along with potential crashes. If you want to know the full list of changes, you can find it on the GitLab release page.
Enso Mode
Enso mode is a hardware-baked lighting configuration that comes prepackaged in the Wraith Prism’s firmware. It overwrites the current user settings, and modifies them to a custom configuration that blends a bunch of different modes. It’s difficult to describe through words, so here’s a short loop of my own Wraith Prism using the mode. It looks pretty cool in person!
You can toggle Enso mode, and reset the cooler back to its default configuration, using this button on the header bar in the GUI:
Firmware Version Reporting
This isn’t something that’s super necessary, but I wanted to include it anyway for completeness’s sake. Wraith Master will now display the firmware version in the header bar in GTK, and a flag has been added to get the firmware version from the CLI as well. Here’s what it looks like:
Memory Fixes
Memory management is hard, but it’s not impossible. After taking a good hard look at my code and how it was tossing around pointers and references, I made some minor changes to how pointers are handled, and this had a sizeable impact on stability. If you were seeing any crashes after using the application for a while, you shouldn’t see those crashes anymore!
Okay, but what’s Wraith Master
For those who missed the first major release, I’ll quickly recap. Wraith Master is an open-source Linux-only RGB control application for the Wraith Prism, written in Kotlin and compiled down to a native binary. It has feature parity with the official Windows application by Cooler Master, and has two interfaces: a CLI and a GUI. The first major release was published in May, and this is the first minor release to address some missing functionality. You can check it out on GitLab, or on the GitHub mirror.
Installation
Ubuntu and Debian
Prebuilt .deb packages are available on the Releases page on both
GitLab and
GitHub.
Fedora
Prebuilt .rpm packages are available on the Releases page on both
GitLab and
GitHub.
Arch
The two frontends are in the AUR under wraith-master-bin for a precompiled
version, and wraith-master-gtk & wraith-master-cli for versions that have to
be compiled from scratch.
Solus
Install it directly from the Software Center (just search for wraith-master).
Others
For other Linux distributions, there are prebuilt binaries available on the
releases page on both
GitLab and
GitHub in the tar.xz
format. If you’d rather build it yourself, the information required to do so is
on the project wiki.
**Wraith Master is currently incompatible with musl, although I am
actively prodding the Kotlin/Native devs to resolve this issue.
Setup
Wraith Master uses the Wraith Prism’s USB protocol to communicate with the device. This requires an internal USB cable, which is provided with the cooler in the processor’s retail box. The two ends look like this:
One end is plugged into the bottom of the cooler (the side that faces towards the bottom of the case), and the other end is plugged into a USB 2 header on the motherboard. Once this cable is plugged in, Wraith Master can communicate with the cooler.
Final Thoughts
Thanks for reading all the way through! I have some ideas for what to implement next, but if you have any suggestions, feel free to either respond to the Reddit post that this is being shared under, or create an issue on the GitLab page linked above. Have a good day!