12

I need to disable all LEDs on my Raspberry Pi 3s otherwise they interfere with the operation of my camera setup. I use Raspbian Jessie.

I can successfully use the following code:

echo 0 >/sys/class/leds/led0/brightness
echo 0 >/sys/class/leds/led1/brightness

Both LED go dark - I am happy. However, if I put these commands in rc.local or in a script called by rc.local, most of the times (but not always) one of those LEDs (in particular the red one) will not turn off. If I ssh into the Pi and repeat the command it will correctly turn off.

When the LED is not turned off, the brightness value contains 255:

# cat /sys/class/leds/led1/brightness
255

like if some other program sets it back up after rc.local is executed.

I have also tried to add:

echo none >/sys/class/leds/led0/trigger
echo none >/sys/class/leds/led1/trigger

But it did not have any effect.

What entity/program might interfere with LED brightness at boot time?

Also note: I have tried to add a 5 to 15 seconds delay to the execution in rc.local but the problem did not disappear, in fact I did not see any difference

Alessio Sangalli
  • 223
  • 1
  • 2
  • 5

5 Answers5

17

For the Raspberry Pi 2 you can add the following lines to /etc/rc.local:

sudo sh -c 'echo none > /sys/class/leds/led0/trigger'
sudo sh -c 'echo none > /sys/class/leds/led1/trigger'
sudo sh -c 'echo 0 > /sys/class/leds/led0/brightness'
sudo sh -c 'echo 0 > /sys/class/leds/led1/brightness'

Maybe it works for RPi3 too?

Aurora0001
  • 6,357
  • 3
  • 25
  • 39
MosEisley
  • 186
  • 1
  • 2
6

Add the following lines to /boot/config.txt:

# Disable Activity LED
dtparam=act_led_trigger=none
dtparam=act_led_activelow=off

Disable Power LED


dtparam=pwr_led_trigger=none
dtparam=pwr_led_activelow=off

Then reboot your Pi and both LEDs should be off permanently. Just tried it myself.

My source: https://buyzero.de/blogs/news/raspberry-pi-strom-sparen-tipps-tricks

UPDATE: This doesn't seem to work for the Power LED on the latest Raspbian (Buster). The image I was using at the time was a much older version (Stretch or possibly even older). If you're using Buster, for the power LED you need to the commands from MosEisley's answer.

Lasse Meyer
  • 161
  • 1
  • 3
3

You can also add this to config.txt to turn off both Ethernet LEDs, on a Pi 3 and later:

# Disable the Ethernet LEDs.
dtparam=eth_led0=14
dtparam=eth_led1=14

Note that if you're using the config.txt method to turn off the power and activity LEDs, you should not use the /sys/class/leds/ method as well. This is because the config.txt method inverts the LED behaviour, which results in echoing 0 to /sys/class/leds/led0/brightness turning the LED on again. (In this case echoing 255, which normally turns the LED on, now turns it off instead.)

Malvineous
  • 2,109
  • 15
  • 25
0

In Raspbian GNU/Linux 12 (bookworm) on a Raspberry Pi 3 Model B Rev 1.2 it does not work to disable the power LED with the modifications to config.txt and the paths to /sys/class/leds/led0/brightness and /sys/class/leds/led1/brightness do not exist.

The following command works:

sudo sh -c 'echo 0 > /sys/class/leds/PWR/brightness'

SysRq
  • 1
0

on rpi 3 with kodi 9.2.x I did it by adding a file autostart.sh (chmod +x) in /storage/.config folder

#!/bin/sh
echo 0 >/sys/class/leds/led1/brightness
echo none >/sys/class/leds/led1/trigger

power led turn on when rebooting but turn off after script execution

G_Freeman
  • 1
  • 1