MuteMe USB-HID Protocol

The MuteMe is a nice little usb-button device. It combines a capacitive sensor on top and an RGB LED. It enumerates as a USB-HID. I suspect it’s running an ESP of some sort internally.

As of 2021-08-31 no github account is public and no source code is published. The MuteMe-Client application is a React javascript application packaged as a cross platform Electron App. The webpack-compressed source code is included in the MacOS application by navigating to /Applications/MuteMe-Client.app/Contents/Resources/app/dist/index.js

Resources

HIDPyToy - a gui HID device browser. HIDAPI - a cross platform low level HID API wrapper. Node-HID - Nodejs bindings for HIDAPI. Also provides a CLI utility hid-showdevices if installed globally.

MuteMe DIY Library

Though the source code isn’t published in a readable form, it is distributed very readable albeit lightly compressed form with the MacOS binary. The file at /Applications/MuteMe-Client.app/Contents/Resources/app/dist/index.js formats well enough with any relatively modern javascript formatter and contains a dozen lines of code (amidst 2300!) which form the device driver. There is also a lot of mumbojumbo about interacting with various web-confrence-call software stuffs, which I don’t have any interest in.

Here is a source file which provides the basic functionality for finding and interacting with the USB-HID MuteMe. Hopefully they’ll let the code live out here so people can hack on the device!

This is not a robust library! It contains none of these safeguards:

• Preventing you from setting color or mode bits which don’t make sense and reboot the device.
• Reasonably timing out when connecting to the device fails.
• Preventing you from setting the color or mode too fast, too early, or to late.

Code

The demo code is rather straightforward. In this configuration it will cycle colors when tapped.

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let { MuteMeButton } = require("./src/mute_me_button.js")

let muteme = new MuteMeButton(MuteMeButton.vendorId, MuteMeButton.productId)
muteme.connect()

let colors = MuteMeButton.colors
let modes = MuteMeButton.modes
let color = 0
let mode = 0

muteme.onTouchStop(function() {
  colorChange()
  // modeChange()
})

function colorChange(){
  muteme.setColor(colors[color])
  if (++ color >= colors.length) color = 0
}

function modeChange(){
  muteme.setMode(modes[mode])
  if (++ mode >= modes.length) mode = 0
}