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raspberry-piraspbianled

Turn off leds of Raspberry Pi

I would like to turn off the leds of my Raspberry Pi.

I tried modifying the file echo none >/sys/class/leds/led0/trigger but nothing changed.

Is this possible?

Solution

  • It's 2022, and the answer today is:

    The documentation is located here, but it may or may not be up to date:

    • on your local file system: /boot/overlays/README
    • online at GitHub: the README file

    The README is a rather choppy document, but you can find enough to get started. The parameters of interest are act_led_*, and pwr_led_*. There are three device tree parameters (dtparam) for both act_led and pwr_led: _trigger, _activelow and _gpio, but the documentation doesn't mention all possible values for them. Through guesswork, I learned the following values will turn the activity/green and power/red LEDs OFF:

    To turn both act_led and pwr_led OFF, add these two lines to the file /boot/config.txt, and then reboot:

    dtparam=act_led_trigger=none
dtparam=pwr_led_trigger=none

    However:

    Changes made on Aug 8, 2022 to the Raspberry Pi's proprietary closed-source firmware have rendered the above configuration ineffective on some models of RPi:

    • Raspberry Pi 3 Model B+
    • Raspberry Pi 4 Model B
    • Raspberry Pi 400
    • Raspberry Pi Compute Module 4

    For these models, with firmware versions issued since Aug. 8, 2022, the following configuration is needed to extinguish the Red Power LED (pwr_led):

    dtparam=pwr_led_trigger=default-on   # The default
dtparam=pwr_led_activelow=off

    There are also parameters for extinguishing the Ethernet LEDs also, but they only work for the 3B+ & 4B models: eth_led0 & eth_led1. Fortunately, the documentation does enumerate a set of values for the 3B+ and the 4B.

    UPDATE, 3/22/22: Additional details are now posted on GitHub

    UPDATE, 8/27/22: A recent software/firmware change by The RPi Organization seems to have broken the device tree configuration (dtparam) that disabled the Red Power LED. A bug report was filed on 2022/08/21. I won't attempt to characterize the maintainer's responses; you may review them & draw your own conclusions.

    As of now, I feel that the answer to the OP's question is that "it depends on the Raspberry Pi model". I've edited my answer above based on the latest information, but this saga will likely have more episodes! FWIW, the sysfs interface - deprecated ~ 2 years ago - still seems to be working if the correct file & value are used; the details are presented in another Q&A on the same subject.

    UPDATE, 12/27/22:

    Any further updates to this answer will be posted to this GitHub repo.