FS Desktop LEDs

A small Mac app · An open beta

A little light.
A better
workspace.

Compatible ELK-BLEDOM and BJ_LED_M / MohuanLED LED strips and desk lights, right in your Mac’s menu bar. Pick a color, settle into a scene, or let your screen and music set the mood.

Download the Mac beta Testers welcome ↗

v0.1.0-beta.2 · Apple Silicon · macOS 14+
Free & open source · Signed & notarized

Finder File   Edit   View
LED strip connected
Turn lights off
Color ›
Scenes ›
Animation ›
Ambient ›
Music ›
Notifications ›
Brightness · 50% ›

Try a color above. Illustrated menu preview.

Native SwiftMenu bar onlyNo telemetryEnglish & Spanish

Make it yours

From focused mornings
to one more song.

01

Pick your light

Named colors, 14 scenes and six animations. Brightness and speed are right at the end of the menu.

02

Let the room follow along

Ambient follows your screen. Music turns bass, mids, treble and detected beats into color, using your Mac’s audio.

03

A gentle heads-up

An optional red, green and blue flash for visible notifications, followed by your previous lighting. This feature is experimental.

Why this exists

“I bought the desk a year ago.
The lights still needed my phone.”

I’m not a gamer. I just wanted to make my workspace a little nicer. My desk came with LED lights, but changing them meant reaching for my phone.

So I built a small Mac app to put that control where I was already working. A warm color in the evening. A little movement with a song. Something nice at the edge of an ordinary workday.

FS stands for Fast and Simple. That’s the idea I want to keep.

Inspired by Glow, by Shivam, and built independently in Swift for the Mac menu bar.

Daniel Lares · Creator of FS PDF Compressor

Before you download

A small beta.
Clear expectations.

Built for ELK-BLEDOM and BJ_LED_M / MohuanLED controllers. Help us verify which other strips, desks and LED products it works with.

Will it work with my lights?

Desktop LEDs supports compatible ELK-BLEDOM and BJ_LED_M / MohuanLED Bluetooth LED controllers, including standalone strips, desk lights and other products that use those chipsets. The tested ELK-BLEDOM controller uses the alternate protocol; BJ_LED_M uses its EE02 channel. Similar names don’t guarantee the same hardware. Other controllers and individual LED addressing are unverified. Current effects change the whole strip together. Animations are generated by the Mac. The firmware-effect commands tested on our controller had no visible response; other command variants remain untested.

What does my Mac need?

An Apple Silicon Mac running macOS 14 or later, with Bluetooth. This first download is for Apple Silicon only. Close the phone’s lighting app if it is holding the Bluetooth connection.

How do I get started?

Open the downloaded disk image, drag Desktop LEDs into Applications, then open it. Click the lightbulb in the menu bar and choose Settings → Lights → Search for lights. Connect your strip and choose a color.

Why does it ask for permissions?

Bluetooth controls the strip. Ambient and Mac audio need screen and system-audio capture permission. Microphone access is only needed if you choose that source. Notification flashes need Accessibility. Capture samples are processed locally and discarded.

Updates and telemetry?

There is no telemetry or analytics. Choose Check for Updates… to check for a signed update with Sparkle. Automatic checks and downloads are off, and system-profile reporting is disabled. Update requests go to GitHub; your lighting, screen and audio data stay on your Mac.

How lightweight is it?

The app is native Swift, with no bundled browser or language runtime. Solid colors stop the animation timer when they settle. Media capture runs only in the modes that need it, with small screen samples and bounded processing.

Memory varies by mode and macOS version. See the measured footprint and test conditions.

What should I expect from the beta?

Audio response needs more real-world testing. Notification detection depends on macOS’s visible banners and can miss alerts; it does not see notices hidden by Focus. A normal quit requests lights off. Force quit cannot do that.

Read the beta release notes ↗

Testers very welcome

Have an ELK-BLEDOM or BJ_LED_M strip?
Give it a try.

Tell us your Mac model, macOS version, product type and the name your lights advertise. Reports about what works are just as useful as bugs.

Share a test report ↗♥ Support the project

Always free. Donations are optional.