My Logitech G733 has a physical mute button on the left earcup. On Windows, G HUB lets me reassign it to something else — Play/Pause, for instance, which is exactly what I want when I'm listening to music. On Linux there's no G HUB: the button just mutes the mic, and that's it. Frustrating for such a small thing.
This is the story of a small investigation that eventually came together — with serious help from my faithful friend Claude.
The hardware and the idea
- Wireless Logitech G733 headset.
- Zorin OS.
- Goal: the mute button should trigger Play/Pause.
- Bonus: turn off the LEDs on the earcups. The headset has no on-board memory, so they come back on at every power-up. I'd masked them with black tape — not great for a €200 headset.
The dead ends
The problem starts with bad news: on Linux, the button does nothing observable. We try several classic angles for catching a peripheral's key press — radio silence each time.
Verdict: the button is frozen in the headset's firmware. It triggers the mic mute inside the device; the operating system is never told the button was even pressed.
The breakthrough
Logitech headsets also speak a private configuration protocol, which G HUB uses to tweak everything (LED colours, key mappings, etc.). We eventually figure out how to talk to that protocol from Linux. And then, bingo: we can tell the headset to stop muting the mic by itself, and to notify the OS on every press instead.
The rest follows naturally: a small program runs in the background, listens to the headset, and on every press makes the system think someone tapped the Play/Pause key on a keyboard. Spotify, YouTube Music and friends can't tell the difference.
The wireless catch
Tricky detail: the wireless headset forgets everything when it powers down. Config forgotten, LEDs back on. No big deal: the headset sends a tiny signal when it wakes up. The program waits for it and re-applies the config in a fraction of a second.
And the LEDs
While we're on the right protocol, we also ask it to set the LEDs to black on both zones. Result: everything off, no tape required.
From a quick script to a clean binary
First version: a quick Python script that works. Second version: rewritten in Rust to produce a single 318 KB file, copy-paste-ready, with nothing else to install. Boots automatically, talks to the headset without needing to be root.
Result
Mute button = Play/Pause. LEDs off. Everything re-applies itself when the headset wakes up. The black tape is in the bin.
And the real moral of the story: I only guided and tested. Everything else — the investigation, finding the right protocol, the Python script, the Rust rewrite, the boot-time integration — was done by my faithful friend Claude. Without an AI beside me I wouldn't even have known where to start. That's the whole bet of this blog: see how far a guided beginner can get. Spoiler: very far.
For the curious
This blog isn't an ad for Claude or for Anthropic — nobody asked me to mention them. Claude is just the tool I happen to use day to day; swap it freely for whichever AI you prefer, the principle is the same.