MicDeck

A small Linux companion app for the DJI Mic Mini wireless microphone. It answers one question at a glance: is my microphone connected, switched on, and is sound actually arriving at the PC?

Unofficial. MicDeck is an independent hobby project. It is not affiliated with, endorsed by or supported by DJI or Anthropic. "DJI" and "DJI Mic Mini" are used only to name the device it works with.

Use at your own risk. MicDeck can change settings on the receiver and transmitter. It only sends commands that were tested on real hardware, but it comes without any warranty (see the licenses).

Deutsche Fassung: README.de.md · The user interface is currently German only.

Device settings	Receiver on, no transmitter	Not connected

Screenshots from the built-in demo mode, which is always labelled "Demo"; no real device data. In demo mode nothing is sent to a device, so the settings are shown locked.

Why

DJI ships no Linux app for the Mic Mini. Existing community tools talk to the receiver's control interface (DJI-Mic-Control, dji-mic-mo), but none of them checks the part that usually goes wrong on Linux: whether the audio really reaches PipeWire, is the default input, isn't muted, and carries a signal. MicDeck combines both views into one traffic light.

Features

• One main view and three sub-pages in a dark "precision desk" layout with a pill-shaped navigation bar at the top: MicDeck (the hardware stage with receiver and transmitters, audio monitor with a big mute button and the microphone test, quick receiver settings), then Device, Diagnostics and App.
• Device settings like DJI's phone app – noise cancelling (on/off, basic/strong), audio channel (mono/stereo), backup recording, low cut, clipping control, auto power-off (receiver and transmitter), power on with camera, transmitter button for noise cancelling, transmitter LED. A change only counts as done once the receiver has acknowledged it and reports the new value; every step of the last 30 minutes is listed under Diagnostics and in ~/.local/state/micdeck/device-writes.log. Settings MicDeck does not send are shown, locked, with the reason (see Changing device settings).
• Traffic light – green (ready), yellow (connected but not fully ready, e.g. "connected but no sound", muted, not the default input), red (not connected or broken), grey (checking). Every state comes with a check list and a concrete fix.
• Three independent sources – USB bus (is the receiver plugged in), the receiver's status data (which transmitters are on, firmware, charging case), PipeWire (input present, default, muted, level).
• Live level in dBFS, clipping indicator and a smoothed loudness label ("quiet", "normal speech", "loud" …). Samples are analysed in memory only while the window is visible; nothing is recorded.
• Hot-plug – plug in, unplug, replug while running; no restart needed.
• Microphone session – press Start and just talk: recording starts when you speak and ends after a short pause (15 s at most), then you hear yourself. A bubble grows while you speak and drains like an hourglass during playback. Speak during playback to cut it short and record a new take (an echo check keeps loudspeaker playback from interrupting itself). Ends by itself after a few quiet seconds. Takes live in memory only and are never written to disk.
• Mute button (window and panel menu) – mutes the DJI input through WirePlumber, which on the Mic Mini receiver flips its own USB mute switch (Mic Capture Switch): from then on the receiver sends silence and no program gets sound, including ones that bypass PipeWire. If another program lifts the mute, MicDeck notifies you. (It is a software-controlled switch, not a physical one: only switching the transmitter off or unplugging the receiver is tamper-proof.)
• Panel icon (StatusNotifierItem) showing the status, with a menu; closing the window keeps MicDeck in the panel. Without a panel the window simply behaves like a normal app.
• Notifications when the receiver is unplugged, a transmitter loses its radio link for more than 3 s, and once more when everything is ready again.
• Charging case – shows "charging" while a transmitter sits in its case, also on the older v1 firmware (see Protocol notes). Optional: mute the input while transmitter 1 is in its case. If another program (a browser, say) starts recording meanwhile, MicDeck lifts the mute just for that recording, says so in a notification and mutes again two seconds after it ends. A mute you set yourself is never lifted.
• Optional: dictation trigger for the Claude desktop app (experimental, off by default) – take transmitter 1 out of its charging case and MicDeck starts dictation in the Claude window; put it back and it stops and sends the message. The panel icon turns into a glowing "sonar" while dictating, then shows a progress bar and a tick.

Panel icon: ready · not fully ready · not connected · dictating · sending · sent.

Status

Tested on one setup only:

Device	DJI Mic Mini receiver (USB 2ca3:4011), firmware 02.03.17.00 (status protocol v2), one transmitter; earlier also firmware 01.01.00.56 (v1)
System	Fedora 44, Cinnamon on X11, PipeWire 1.6, WirePlumber 0.5
Tests	101 automated tests (protocol, readiness rules, setting rules and change tracking, level maths, speech detection, PipeWire parsing, notifications, charging-case trigger) plus a hardware round trip of every setting MicDeck sends

Not tested: DJI Mic Mini 2 / 2S, two transmitters at once, Wayland, other desktops. Reports and fixes are welcome.

Changing device settings

MicDeck sends a command only when you switch a setting, one at a time, and only for the eleven settings it lists as writable. Each change waits for the receiver's acknowledgement (sequence number echoed, result code "accepted") and then for a status frame that reports the new value; anything else is shown as an error ("refused", "no answer", "acknowledged but not applied"). On firmware 02.03.17.00 all eleven were switched and switched back on real hardware with cargo run -p usb-link --example settings_roundtrip: every one was acknowledged and read back within about 0.1–0.2 s.

Never sent (gain, the plug-free speaker and the firmware are shown read-only; voice tone is left out):

Setting	Why
Plug-free external speaker	switching it restarts the receiver and cuts the audio to the PC – change it in DJI's app
Voice tone	DJI Mic Mini 2 only
Gain	set with the dial on the receiver, not over USB (shown read-only)
Firmware update	DJI's app only; MicDeck never touches firmware

Settings that need firmware v2 are locked on v1 firmware, per-transmitter settings are locked while no transmitter is on, backup recording only works in mono, and the noise-cancelling level needs noise cancelling switched on – the same rules as DJI's app. With a single transmitter MicDeck keeps the receiver in mono: stereo puts transmitter 1 on the left and 2 on the right, so one side would stay silent. A switch moves at once; only a failed change shows a message (and the switch falls back).

Install

There are no prebuilt packages yet. Build an RPM yourself (Fedora):

sudo dnf install webkit2gtk4.1-devel librsvg2-devel libxdo-devel pipewire-devel clang rust cargo
# Node.js + pnpm are needed for the interface
cd app && pnpm install && ./node_modules/.bin/tauri build --bundles rpm
sudo dnf install ../target/release/bundle/rpm/MicDeck-*.rpm

.deb and AppImage targets are configured in app/src-tauri/tauri.conf.json but have not been built or tested. Rust 1.90 or newer is required.

Without the clang package, libclang does not find its own headers (stdbool.h) while generating the PipeWire bindings. .cargo/config.toml points it to /usr/lib/clang/22/include as a workaround; adjust the version there if your clang differs.

USB permission

Sound and level work without it. To read the receiver's status data, MicDeck needs access to this one USB device. The package installs packaging/70-micdeck.rules, which grants it only to the user logged in at the computer (uaccess): no 0666, no extra group.

Using it

• Panel icon – left click shows/hides the window; right click opens the menu: open, mute, notifications on/off, charging-case dictation on/off, mute while in the case, start at login (installed app only), quit. The same switches are on the App page; both stay in sync.
• Start page – micdeck --page=device opens a page directly (overview, device, diagnose, app).
• Your own device pictures – MicDeck ships silhouettes only. Put receiver.png and transmitter.png (or .webp/.jpg, ideally cut out on a transparent background, at most 10 MB) into ~/.config/micdeck/devices/ and restart MicDeck to see your own pictures instead. They never leave your computer.
• Start at login creates ~/.config/autostart/micdeck.desktop (started with --hidden, panel only) and removes it again when switched off. Settings live in ~/.config/micdeck/settings.json.
• Demo mode – micdeck --demo cycles through all twelve scenarios; micdeck --demo=no-transmitter shows one (ready, no-transmitter, silent, muted, not-default, clipping, low-battery, no-permission, busy, unplugged, no-audio-input, pipewire-down).
• Debugging – RUST_LOG=info,usb_link=debug,audio_pw=debug micdeck; usb_link=trace also prints every status frame from the receiver as hex.

Charging-case dictation (experimental)

Requirements: X11, the Claude desktop app running, and its dictation shortcut left at the default Ctrl+D. Keys are only ever sent to the Claude window: MicDeck brings it to the front first and presses nothing if that fails, because Ctrl+D means something else elsewhere (in a terminal it closes the shell). After putting the transmitter back it waits 1 s for the end of your sentence, presses Ctrl+D, waits 2 s for the final transcript and presses Enter. Ctrl+D is a toggle and MicDeck can't see Claude's dictation state: if you stop a dictation by hand, start and stop swap – one manual Ctrl+D puts it right.

Privacy

No telemetry, no cloud, no background services besides the app itself. Audio is analysed in memory while a level meter is visible and is never stored or sent anywhere.

Development

crates/dji-protocol   DJI status protocol (vendored from DJI-Mic-Control, see THIRD_PARTY.md)
crates/micdeck-core   state, readiness rules, level maths, notifications, demo scenarios – no hardware access
crates/usb-link       USB: hot-plug, permission/busy detection, status frames, setting changes
crates/audio-pw       PipeWire: inputs, default input, mute, level meter
app/src-tauri         Tauri app, panel icon, dictation trigger
app/src               interface (Svelte 5 + TypeScript)
packaging/            udev rule, RPM scripts
docs/                 protocol notes, screenshots

cd app && pnpm install
cargo test --workspace
./node_modules/.bin/tauri dev            # live
./node_modules/.bin/tauri dev -- -- --demo
# hardware check of the write path (quit MicDeck first; restores every value)
cargo run -p usb-link --example settings_roundtrip

Protocol notes

The receiver's status protocol is documented in docs/protocol/PROTOCOL.md (from DJI-Mic-Control). MicDeck adds one finding from real hardware: on v1 firmware, bit 0x02 of a transmitter's flags byte is set while it sits in the charging case (0x26 docked, 0x24 taken out on firmware 01.01.00.56) – the same bit v2 firmware reports as "docked/charging".

License

MicDeck is licensed under either of MIT or Apache-2.0, at your option. crates/dji-protocol is The Unlicense (public domain), as in its upstream. Third-party components and what was changed are listed in THIRD_PARTY.md.