Supported Devices

ROLI shipped a surprisingly diverse family of Blocks devices: pressure-sensitive pads, keyboard strips, control surfaces, loop controllers, and more. blocksd supports all known Blocks devices through the topology and keepalive protocol. LED bitmap streaming is currently limited to the Lightpad family, which is the only device type with an addressable RGB grid.

Device Matrix

Device	USB PID	Serial Prefix	LED Grid	Status
Lightpad Block	0x0900	LPB	15x15	✅ Tested
Lightpad Block M	0x0900	LPM	15x15	✅ Tested
LUMI Keys Block	0x0E00	LKB	—	✅ Tested
Seaboard Block	0x0700	SBB	—	🔲 Untested
Live Block	—	LIC	—	🔲 Untested
Loop Block	—	LOC	—	🔲 Untested
Developer Control Block	—	DCB	—	🔲 Untested
Touch Block	—	TCB	—	🔲 Untested
Seaboard RISE 25	0x0200	—	—	🔲 Untested
Seaboard RISE 49	0x0210	—	—	🔲 Untested
ROLI Piano (49-key)	0x0F00	—	—	🔲 Untested
ROLI Airwave Pedal	0x1000	—	—	🔲 Untested

What "Tested" Means

Tested devices have been physically connected and verified through the full lifecycle: serial request, topology discovery, API mode activation, keepalive, and (where applicable) LED control and touch events.

Untested devices are supported at the protocol level. blocksd will discover them, read their serial numbers, include them in topology, and maintain API mode keepalive. But the specific device behavior hasn't been validated with real hardware.

LED Capabilities

Only Lightpad Block and Lightpad Block M expose a 15x15 RGB LED grid through the bitmap frame protocol. These are the only devices that:

• Advertise grid_width = 15 and grid_height = 15 in discovery
• Accept binary LED frame writes
• Respond to blocksd led CLI commands

Other devices (LUMI Keys, Seaboard, Control Blocks) are discoverable and kept alive, but they advertise grid_width = 0 / grid_height = 0 and reject frame writes.

Touch Capabilities

Touch events are supported on devices with pressure-sensitive surfaces:

• Lightpad Block / M: 15x15 continuous touch surface with X, Y, Z (pressure) and velocity
• Seaboard Block: continuous pitch surface with MPE expression
• LUMI Keys: key-level pressure sensitivity

Touch events are normalized to floating-point values (0.0 to 1.0) regardless of the device's native resolution.

Button Capabilities

Control-style devices emit button press/release events:

• Live Block: transport controls
• Loop Block: loop controls
• Developer Control Block: programmable buttons

Buttons are identified by a 12-bit button ID.

DNA Mesh Networking

All Blocks devices support DNA magnetic connectors for mesh networking. When blocks are physically connected:

• The USB-connected block becomes the master (topology index 0)
• DNA-connected blocks get indices 1+
• All protocol messages to non-master blocks are routed through the master
• Touch events from DNA blocks arrive through the master's USB connection

blocksd tracks the full mesh topology and maintains keepalive for all devices in the chain.

Device Memory

Devices have limited memory for LittleFoot programs:

Device Type	Program + Heap	Stack
Pad Block (Lightpad)	7200 bytes	800 bytes
Control Block	3000 bytes	800 bytes

The BitmapLEDProgram (LED repaint routine) is 94 bytes, leaving the rest of the heap available for pixel data.

USB Identification

All ROLI devices share vendor ID 0x2AF4. blocksd identifies devices by:

1. Scanning MIDI port names for "BLOCK" or "Block"
2. Validating the USB vendor ID via sysfs (fallback check)
3. Requesting the serial number to determine the exact device type

The MIDI port name check is primary because it works across all Linux MIDI subsystems. The sysfs check provides additional confidence when the port name is ambiguous.