ThermalLight

A Windows system-tray app that displays custom images and animated GIFs on the LCD screen built into the Thermalright Elite Vision AIO cooler. Runs silently at startup, no admin rights required, no TRCC driver needed.

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Features

• Image editor — crop any image to a square, preview it, then push it to the LCD with one click
• Animated GIF support — full per-frame playback at the GIF's native frame rate
• Gallery — browse all uploaded images in a scrollable thumbnail panel; active image highlighted
• Upload — import PNG, JPEG, BMP, GIF, WebP, or TIFF files from anywhere
• Startup registration — registers itself to launch at Windows login automatically
• System tray — lives in the notification area; double-click to open the editor
• Custom taskbar icon — LCD-branded icon, not the default Python icon

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Requirements

• Windows 10/11 (64-bit)
• Python 3.10 or later — python.org
• Thermalright Elite Vision AIO connected via USB (VID 0x87AD / PID 0x70DB)
• libusb-1.0 (installed automatically by install.bat via the libusb pip package)

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Installation

Double-click tr_lcd_service\install.bat — no admin needed.

It will:

1. Install all Python dependencies (pip install -r requirements.txt)
2. Register ThermalLight to start at Windows login
3. Launch the tray icon immediately

The LCD icon appears in the notification area. Double-click it to open the editor.

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Usage

Opening the editor

Double-click the tray icon, or right-click → Open Editor.

Setting an image

1. Click Upload to import a file (PNG, JPEG, BMP, GIF, WebP, TIFF)
2. Drag the selection box to choose the crop area; drag a corner handle to resize it
3. Click Apply — the image is cropped, resized to 240×240, and sent to the LCD instantly

Previously applied images stay in the gallery for one-click reuse.

Animated GIFs

Upload a GIF the same way as a static image. Each frame is encoded and played back on the LCD at the GIF's original frame rate.

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Uninstalling

Double-click tr_lcd_service\uninstall.bat, then right-click the tray icon → Exit.

Or manually:

reg delete "HKCU\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Run" /v TRLCDTray /f

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Log file

C:\ProgramData\TRLCDService\service.log

Right-click tray icon → Open Log to view it directly. Rotates at 5 MB, 2 backups kept.

Set log_level = DEBUG in config.ini for verbose USB output.

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Manual config

C:\ProgramData\TRLCDService\config.ini:

[lcd]
image_path      = C:\ProgramData\TRLCDService\_lcd_output.png
resend_interval = 1
log_level       = INFO

image_path is updated automatically on Apply. resend_interval controls how often the static frame is re-pushed to keep the display alive (default 1 s).

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Troubleshooting

Symptom	Check
LCD stays blank	Check log for USB errors; replug the AIO and wait for Windows to re-enumerate it
"Device not found" in log	Confirm VID 0x87AD / PID 0x70DB appears in Device Manager under USB devices
libusb error on first run	Re-run install.bat; ensure pip install libusb completed without errors
Tray icon missing	Run python tr_lcd_service\tray.py in a terminal to see startup errors
Image looks stretched	Use the crop handles to select a square region before applying

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How it works

1. Device — pyusb opens the vendor-class bulk USB device directly; no OS driver or mass-storage interface required
2. Protocol — a single bulk OUT write sends a 64-byte header (magic, dimensions, RGB565 mode) followed by raw pixel data; no ACK needed
3. Image pipeline — source → PIL crop → resize to 240×240 (LANCZOS) → numpy RGB565 encode → bulk write
4. GIF playback — all frames pre-encoded at load time; LCD thread cycles through (bytes, delay_s) pairs
5. Resend loop — static images are resent every resend_interval seconds to prevent the display blanking on USB idle
6. Thread model — LCD runs on a daemon thread; GUI and thread communicate only via threading.Event and config on disk — no shared mutable state

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Project structure

tr_lcd_service/
├── tray.py          # Entry point — tray icon, app lifecycle, LCD driver thread
├── gui.py           # CustomTkinter editor window (gallery, crop editor, upload)
├── device.py        # USB device discovery and bulk image transfer
├── image_utils.py   # Resize and numpy RGB565 encoding
├── config.py        # INI config read/write
├── install.bat      # One-click install and startup registration
└── uninstall.bat    # Removes startup entry