Taking use of laptop custom buttons

Question

I have a Lenovo Y550 laptop which has a nice looking touch sensitive strip with led lights on top of keyboard. The usage for this is however quite useless (it can be used to start 4 different Lenovo programs) so I started to think if I could program something of my own for it.

However I don't have any experience with this kind of thing.

First of all I'd like to know if it's even possible to use it on my own program in any way (capture touches or even control the lights).

Second, where should I start researching about this? I checked Windows Device Manager to see if I could spot anything helpful there, but no success. I can only see many kind of HID devices there.

One thing that is on my mind is to use some kind of hooks to take usage of this. Could that work? I don't really mind what language I'll have to use, learning new ones is a useful anyway.

If it is possible to totally control the touch sensitive strip it would be nice to light up the led lights as I will on it (now led light lights up where my finger is).

Answer 1

I did something similar for my Logitech keyboard. I had to hook the low level keyboard hook, and I modified the Logitech specific key codes into a Windows generic one. All in all a very simple, short and limited tool, without any configuration, but it did its work reliably and only used a few kb or memory.

Get a low level keyboard hook working, set a breakpoint and see what key codes you get. Don't know about the LEDs though.

Edit: Found it. It's been quite a while since I wrote this.