💡 Aura Toggle

Turn off ASUS RGB — without Armoury Crate.

Download · Command line · Effects · Changelog · Deutsch

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	Aura Toggle	Armoury Crate
Size	~580 KB	Hundreds of MB
Background service	None	Always running

Quickstart:

1. Download AuraToggle.exe below (or the installer)
2. Run it — no setup, no admin rights
3. Click the button

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🌙 The problem

RGB lighting on a mainboard is usually all-or-nothing: it either runs whatever effect the BIOS left it in, or it runs whatever the vendor's control suite last set. Turning it off for a while — a dark room at night, a long render, a stretch without needing the show — normally means one of two routes:

Option	What it costs
Armoury Crate	Background service, auto-start, updater, hundreds of MB
BIOS	A reboot to switch off, another reboot to switch back on
Aura Toggle	One click. Delete the file when you no longer need it

Aura Toggle exists for the case where none of that is worth it for flipping one switch.

✨ What it does

• 🔌 Switches every channel the board reports: the onboard zone and all addressable ARGB headers
• 🎯 Or one channel at a time — the onboard zone steady white while an ARGB header breathes red
• 🎨 Nine built-in effects with a colour picker, applied instantly
• 🔆 Brightness for the colour effects, 10 – 100 %, per channel or for the whole board
• 🧩 Custom presets — a name, one effect and colour per channel, saved and reusable
• 🖥️ One window: a button that animates the running effect and switches it
• 📌 Lives in the notification area, right-click for on/off
• ⌨️ Full command line with exit codes — scheduled tasks, scripts, shortcuts
• 🔥 A global hotkey, configurable, switches the whole board from anywhere
• 🔒 No admin rights, no driver, no telemetry — the application makes no network connections at all

🚫 What it can't do

• No individual LED control — an effect and colour apply to a whole channel, not one LED
• Only one dynamic effect per controller — spectrum cycle, rainbow, rainbow breathing and wave run across every channel of a controller at once, not one at a time
• Only mainboard lighting — no GPU, RAM, fans or other Aura Sync devices
• No channel of its own for a plain (non-addressable) 12 V RGB header — only what the board reports as its onboard zone is switched
• Can't read the current effect back from the controller — it remembers what it last set instead

📥 Download

➡️ Latest release — both files are attached there, along with SHA256SUMS.txt to check them against.

	Size	Needs
Portable AuraToggle.exe	~580 KB	.NET 10 Desktop Runtime
Installer AuraToggle-Setup-<version>.exe	~2.3 MB	Nothing — it fetches the runtime if you lack it

Portable: download, double click, done. Installer: for everyone or just for you, optional autostart and desktop shortcut, clean uninstall. If the .NET 10 Desktop Runtime is missing it asks once, downloads it from Microsoft and installs it.

🚀 Using it

1. Big button — shows the state and switches it. While the lighting is on it animates whatever effect is running, brightness included.
2. Drop down — pick a built-in effect or a saved custom preset, it applies immediately. The last row creates a preset; each preset of your own carries a ✏️ to edit it and an ✕ to delete it, which asks once more before it does.
3. Channel selector — all channels, or a single one: the onboard zone, one ARGB header, or one whole controller on boards that have several. Hover a channel for a ✏️ to give it a name of your own.
4. Colour chips — appear for effects that use a colour, including a custom colour picker.
5. Brightness — appears with the chips, 10 to 100 %, and follows the channel selector: dim one header on its own, or set the whole board at once, which hands every channel back to the board-wide value.
6. ⚙️ Gear — autostart, minimise instead of close, lighting at start, a global hotkey, animation on/off, language, open the log folder, reset everything back to first-run defaults.

Minimising sends the window to the notification area. Right click the icon there to toggle the lighting, reopen or quit.

Custom presets

A custom preset bundles one effect and colour per channel under a name of your own — the onboard zone steady white while an ARGB header breathes red, say. Create one from the last row of the effect drop down: name it, then an effect and colour per channel, save. Every channel starts out matching whatever is running right now, so a preset that should just save the current look needs no changes at all. It then shows up in the effect list next to a small person icon, told apart from the built-in effects at a glance. Each channel also carries its own brightness there, so a preset can hold one header at 30 % and the next at full. The editor has no title bar of its own but can be dragged by its heading, so it never sits in the way.

⌨️ Command line

AuraToggle.exe                            :: opens the window
AuraToggle.exe -off                       :: lighting off
AuraToggle.exe -on                        :: back to the last effect
AuraToggle.exe -preset rainbow            :: switch to an effect
AuraToggle.exe -preset static "#20C0FF"   :: effect with a colour
AuraToggle.exe -brightness 40             :: dim the colour effects, 10 to 100
AuraToggle.exe -custom "Movie Night"      :: apply a preset saved in the window
AuraToggle.exe -list                      :: number every controller and channel
AuraToggle.exe -status                    :: current effect, colour, brightness, on/off
AuraToggle.exe --version                  :: version number, nothing else
AuraToggle.exe -help                      :: every command, explained

-on, --on, /on, on — all accepted, any casing. Same for off, preset, brightness, custom, list, status, version and help (also -h and /?). Creating a custom preset still only happens in the window - applying an existing one does not.

One channel or controller, with -on, -off, -preset and -brightness:

AuraToggle.exe -preset static red -channel 2       :: by the number from -list
AuraToggle.exe -preset static red -channel 1.2     :: controller 1, channel 2
AuraToggle.exe -preset static red -channel "ARGB 1" :: by its default or renamed name
AuraToggle.exe -on -device 1                       :: every channel of controller 1

-channel accepts a flat number from -list, the <controller>.<channel> form, the default name in either language, or a name given in the window - matched the same forgiving way as preset names (casing, spaces and hyphens ignored). Unknown or ambiguous exits 2 and lists the possible targets on stderr. -list and -status are always in English, regardless of the window's language, so a script reading them does not break when someone switches it; error messages stay translated.

Exit codes: 0 ok · 2 bad argument · 3 no controller · 4 controller busy · 5 communication error. Errors go to stderr.

⚠️ PowerShell does not wait for windowed apps. For the exit code use Start-Process AuraToggle.exe -ArgumentList "-off" -Wait -NoNewWindow.

Lights out at night, automatically:

schtasks /create /tn "LEDs off" /tr "C:\tools\AuraToggle.exe -off" /sc daily /st 23:30
schtasks /create /tn "LEDs on"  /tr "C:\tools\AuraToggle.exe -on"  /sc daily /st 08:00

🎨 Effects

Name	Looks like	Colour
static	One steady colour	✅
breathing	Fades in and out	✅
flashing	Blinks	✅
spectrum-cycle	All LEDs cycle the spectrum together	—
rainbow	Gradient travelling across the LEDs (ASUS default)	—
rainbow-breathing	Spectrum cycle that fades	—
chase-fade	Running light with a fading tail	✅
chase	Running light	✅
wave	Slow spectrum drifting across the strip	—

Names are forgiving: casing, spaces, hyphens and underscores are ignored, and the translated names work too. An unknown name prints the list.

Brightness works by scaling the colour that is sent, so it applies to the five effects marked ✅ above. The other four are generated inside the controller's own firmware, which takes no colour and no brightness — nothing can dim those short of switching them off.

Effects can be mixed across channels — one header steady red while the next one breathes — but only for the five colour effects. The other four are one effect engine inside the controller, shared by all of its channels: set the rainbow on a single header and every header of that controller runs it. The window still offers all nine with a single channel selected, but flags it with a hint rather than letting the choice quietly spread.

💻 Requirements

• Windows 10 or 11, 64 bit
• An ASUS mainboard with an onboard Aura USB controller (most ASUS boards with Aura Sync or addressable RGB headers have one, going back several chipset generations)

Developed and verified on an ASUS Z790 mainboard. The controller is found by talking to it directly, not by a model list, so it either works or reports no controller found — see Troubleshooting.

🛠️ Troubleshooting

"No AURA LED controller found" No Aura USB controller on the board, or lighting is off in the BIOS.

"The AURA LED controller is in use by another program" Armoury Crate, OpenRGB or SignalRGB hold it open. Close them — two programs cannot drive the same controller.

The lighting comes back looking different The controller cannot report which effect is running, so the tool remembers what it set last. On the very first switch-on it falls back to the ASUS rainbow. Reboot, or just pick the effect you want.

🔨 Building

Needs the .NET 10 SDK. The installer additionally needs Inno Setup 6.

build.bat at the root of the repository is the whole build. Run it with no argument, or double click it, and it produces everything a release consists of:

build.bat                REM everything: portable exe, installer, checksums
build.bat portable       REM only the portable x64 exe and its two shortcuts
build.bat installer      REM only the setup

It empties dist\ first, so what is left there afterwards is exactly the release: AuraToggle.exe, the Aura On / Aura Off shortcuts, AuraToggle-Setup-<version>.exe and SHA256SUMS.txt. The version comes from the project file, not from anything typed twice. Set NOPAUSE=1 to run it from a script without the closing keypress.

The single command behind the portable build, if you would rather not use the script:

dotnet publish AuraToggle.csproj -c Release -r win-x64 --self-contained false -p:PublishSingleFile=true -o dist

For the Inno Setup installer, pack installer\aura.iss with ISCC.exe (needs Inno Setup 6).

Regression suite — it switches the lighting while it runs and leaves it on afterwards:

powershell -ExecutionPolicy Bypass -File tests\aura-tests.ps1

⚙️ How it works

The controller is a USB HID device. Aura Toggle enumerates the HID interfaces, asks each candidate for its firmware string and configuration table, and keeps the ones that answer — which is why no interface number is hardcoded, and why more than one controller is found on boards that have them. The configuration table gives each controller's channel layout; one effect command per channel does the rest.

Commands are paced and the sequence is sent twice: the controller silently drops commands that arrive while it is still busy, which otherwise left the ARGB headers running after the onboard zone had already switched.

State lives in %LOCALAPPDATA%\aura-toggle — state.json for the last effect and brightness, settings.json for your preferences, presets.json for custom presets, channel-state.json for what each channel was last set to including its own brightness, channel-names.json for channels you renamed, and log.txt (rotated to log.old.txt past 200 KB) for start-up, version and error entries. The per-channel files are keyed by the controller's device path, so the entries survive a reboot. Portable and installed builds share the folder, every write goes through a temporary file so an interrupted save cannot corrupt one, and uninstalling offers to delete it. Nothing in there is ever sent anywhere, and your user name is replaced with %USERPROFILE% in anything the log or the error dialog writes out.

📄 Licence and trademarks

MIT: free to use privately or commercially, pass on and change, no strings attached beyond keeping the copyright notice with it. The software comes without any warranty, and nobody is liable for what it does on your machine.

This is an independent project. It is not made, endorsed or supported by ASUSTeK Computer Inc. "ASUS", "ROG", "TUF" and "Aura" are trademarks of their respective owners, used here only to describe which hardware this talks to. No ASUS software, driver or library is used, bundled or required.