deskctl

A tool to remote control Bluetooth-enabled standing desks.

It was created out of necessity, to have a fully-fledged tool to control my standing desk from the command line.

deskcli is based on findings from phord/Jarvis and pimp-my-desk/desk-control where most UART commands were found. deskctl just establishes a Bluetooth connection to the desk and issues respective commands. That's it.

Warning

deskctl is in WIP, with a limited set of features supported. Also, various bugs may surface as well.

Prerequisites

• Bluetooth 4.0 adapter
• Standing desk with a compatible controller

Building

make build

Upon successful build, the binary is located on ./bin/deskctl

Usage

Firstly, scan for supported devices

deskctl devices

For each supported device, MAC address, name and signal strength are shown.

Some example commands. Use the MAC address provided from deskctl devices

Move up or down

It is equivalent of pushing once the up or down button on your desk.

deskctl -a <DEVICE_MAC_ADDRESS> up
deskctl -a <DEVICE_MAC_ADDRESS> down

Move the desk to a specific height

Assuming that you just need to move the desk to an arbitrary height (e.g 107 cm), you can use the following command.

deskctl -a <DEVICE_MAC_ADDRESS>  goto-height 107

Go to a memory preset

Standing desks have usually up to 4 memory presets to store desk heights to. If you are already have configured a memory preset (e.g memory preset 1), you can move the desk to that preset.

deskctl -a <DEVICE_MAC_ADDRESS> goto-memory 1

Supported devices

Currently desks with Jiecang controllers equipped with Lierda LSD4BT-E95ASTD001 BLE module are supported. Controllers from other manufacturers may or may not work with this tool.

Acknowledgements

Thanks to phord/Jarvis and pimp-my-desk/desk-control for reverse engineering the UART protocol used in Jiecang standing desks. Also special thanks to Cindy Xiao and their post on how use gatttool to access data from BLE devices. In fact, this post intrigued me in order to create a full fledged tool to control my standing desk.