[Barjack]

I believe the G15 LCD stuff is built into WoW, and not something addons can directly access. When you extract UI data there are XML files related to this, but as far as I'm aware this isn't something that addons can override or interact with.

Even if you were to somehow write or acquire an emulator for the LCD (I have no idea if such a thing exists but I would guess not), I don't think threat is even something that WoW sends to be displayed on the LCD (at least according to the layout XML, it is not), so you still wouldn't end up with the data you need.

The only ways I can think of achieving what you want would be to either, 1) peek into WoW's memory directly, or 2) have an addon display threat on the screen in an easily-parsable way, and then write a program to read the screen. From there your program would send its data to the LED.

The first option is probably way too advanced, and uses mechanisms similar to what cheat programs would use, so you'll probably face very significant obstacles designed specifically to prevent what you want to do. This may also violate the ToS or EULA in some way (research this yourself). I wouldn't recommend this to someone new to programming in a million years.

The second is less difficult and probably less risky in terms of any violations (but I still wouldn't necessarily count on that, as they tend to be drawn very widely). But it is still comparatively difficult--you'll have to research yourself how to constantly grab screen data on whatever OS you're using and extract the data you need from those images. If you can do that, the addon part wouldn't be particularly difficult, but if you've never looked at Lua before obviously you will have to learn a little about that along with WoW's widget API so you can make a small coloured texture on-screen somewhere that changes with your threat level, which your program would have to capture and read from.

Honestly, I think both methods are probably way too ambitious for a student without significant programming experience to do as a simple (I assume undergrad) project.

In my opinion, it's best to take the restrictions imposed on addons at face value--addons cannot communicate with the outside world while WoW is running. So if I were you I'd either look at things that can be done by parsing SavedVariables (which isn't very exciting since you have to close WoW before you could run your program), or come up with a different idea. Trying to bypass the restrictions imposed on addons is a pretty advanced task and probably not worth the trouble.