Turn off leds of Raspberry Pi

Question 1

It's Mar 15, 2022, and the answer today is:

The documentation is now located here:

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 correct values to 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

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: Additional details are now posted on GitHub

Question 2

RaspberryMediaCenter:/sys/class/leds # echo 0 >/sys/class/leds/led1/brightness
RaspberryMediaCenter:/sys/class/leds # echo 0 >/sys/class/leds/led0/brightness

led0 green one

led1 red one

Question 3

According to the RaspberryPi forums:

echo 1 >/sys/class/leds/led0/brightness #Turn on
echo 0 >/sys/class/leds/led0/brightness #Turn off

Though I think some kernel hacking may be involved to control all of them, I believe this only works with the OK LED.

Question 4

Depending on which LED you are talking about, it looks like it is not possible.

For more information, read How can I turn the lights off on my pi? (and that's also a good place to ask RPi questions)

Question 5

On the Pi you can control the 2 Leds (red and green) by editing the files located under:

/sys/class/leds/led[num]

For example to turn off the usual blinking of the green led when the Pi is accessing the sd card, you can run (as admin):

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

And to turn on or off one led, you can change the status of the brightness file (as admin):

echo 1 > /sys/class/leds/led0/brightness     # turn on
echo 0 > /sys/class/leds/led0/brightness     # turn off

This is my very inelegant workaround in Python to actually control the status:

import time
import os

# turn off the default trigger of the green LED
os.system("sudo bash -c \"echo none > /sys/class/leds/led0/trigger\"")

# turn on the green LED
os.system("sudo bash -c \"echo 1 > /sys/class/leds/led0/brightness\"")

# keep it on 5 seconds
time.sleep(5)

# turn off the green LED on PI
os.system("sudo bash -c \"echo 0 > /sys/class/leds/led0/brightness\"")

Question 6

I realize that this is an old question. But, it was the first in the Google results for me, and it didn't work for my Raspberry Pi2 B+. For anyone else like me finding this now, the techniques at http://www.jeffgeerling.com/blogs/jeff-geerling/controlling-pwr-act-leds-raspberry-pi did work.