rodey

Like a roadie who runs the gear — but for your RØDECaster.

Unofficial Python library, CLI and MCP server for the RØDECaster Pro II.

Install

curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/seanheiney/rodey/main/install.sh | bash

macOS or Linux. Installs into an isolated environment, pulls in hidapi, and (on Linux) adds a udev rule for non-root access. Then:

rodey channels          # what's patched to each strip

RØDE ships no host API — the board is configured on its touchscreen or through their GUI app. This talks to it directly over its vendor USB HID interface, using a protocol reverse-engineered by observing RØDE's own app, not by guessing.

Alpha, unofficial, and not affiliated with RØDE. Developed against firmware 1.7.3. Read docs/PROTOCOL.md — especially the safety section — before writing anything to your board.

Related MCP server: reaper-mcp-server

Why

The board exposes a rich control surface — per-channel noise gate, compressor, de-esser, HPF, Aphex processing, faders, mutes, routing — that is otherwise only reachable by tapping a touchscreen. This makes it scriptable, and lets an AI agent drive it through MCP.

Install from PyPI / source

pip install rodey          # library + CLI
pip install 'rodey[mcp]'   # plus the MCP server

Requires hidapi (brew install hidapi on macOS, libhidapi-dev on Debian/Ubuntu). On Linux you will also need a udev rule for non-root access.

CLI

rodey channels                       # what is patched to each strip
rodey get noiseGateOn                # value per channel
rodey list -f gate                   # discover property names
rodey set 0x1c noiseGateOn on        # write, then verify
rodey watch                          # live changes from the board

Reads take about 11 seconds. That isn't a bug: the handshake makes the device serialise its entire state tree (~138 KB), and that dump is the read channel.

Library

from rodey import Rodecaster

with Rodecaster() as rc:
    print(rc.get("channelInputSource"))          # [0, 1, 10, 7, 8, ...]
    print(rc.get("noiseGateOn"))                 # [False, False, ...]

    if rc.set_verified(0x1C, "noiseGateOn", True):
        print("gate on")

set_verified diffs the state dump before and after. Prefer it over set: the device does not echo writes back to the handle that made them, so nothing else confirms a write actually landed.

MCP server

rodey-mcp

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "rodey": { "command": "rodey-mcp" }
  }
}

Tools: get_property, set_property, list_properties, list_known_objects, watch_changes. Every write is verified and reports whether it landed. No tool can reach the mode-command channel, and there is deliberately no objID scanner.

Safety

Two things will damage or disrupt a board. Both are enforced in code, not left to documentation:

Report 1 carries firmware commands. 0x4D ('M') enters firmware update mode and 0x55 ('U') triggers a flash. This library refuses every byte there except 0x4E. Note that a widely-linked open-source project probes 0x55 as a "ping" — it is not a ping.

Never sweep object IDs. Writing noiseGateOn across 0x1c–0x33 permanently added that property to objects that never had it (24 occurrences afterwards, versus 10 for an untouched control). Object IDs must be harvested from observed writes — see tools/harvest_objids.py.

Also: don't verify writes by measuring audio. A condenser's noise floor drifts several dB on its own, which produced two opposite wrong conclusions during development. Diff the state dump instead.

Status

Two addressing formulas cover most of the device:

channel_object_id(strip)            # 0x1C + strip        - all channel processing
mix_mute_object_id(source, bus)     # 0x4C + 13*source+bus - the routing matrix

Contributions of harvested object IDs are welcome — see docs/PROTOCOL.md and tools/.

License

MIT