I’ve been using an Elgato Stream Deck to control my lights in my office for the past several years. The one I have (with 15 buttons) has worked great for me, but I noticed that I only really use 8 of the buttons. The rest work perfectly fine, but I always forget the macros I have saved there, and really just go back to defaulting to lighting control.

Now, lately because I’m editing videos a lot more (both for work and personally), I’ve been looking to get some kind of knob or dial for my desk to be able to scrub through footage faster.

These scenarios combined, I ended up finding the Logitech MX Creative Console! The buttons look exactly like the Stream Deck ones (only there’s 9 of them, with options to switch between pages and apps), and it comes with a Bluetooth rotary dial with buttons.

General review

These things get the job done. I do wish that the dial could plug in instead of just relying on Bluetooth, but besides that, programming the buttons was fairly straight forward, and everything connected pretty seamlessly. Because I already have a Logitech mouse and a backup webcam, I didn’t have to install any extra software, which was also nice.

(also… this is not a sponsored post, I’m truly just using all these products for myself)

That being said… Elgato and Logitech, being competitors, did not play as nicely out of the box.

Building a custom solution

Because I couldn’t control my Elgato Key Lights natively from my desk, I brought out the GitHub Copilot CLI to help change that (once again, not sponsored, but I do work at GitHub, full disclosure). The Elgato lights have their own IP addresses and a REST API, so I figured I could use the tools I have to throw together a script!

In the CLI, I opened up Plan Mode and prompted:

I want to be able to control Elgato Key Lights using buttons on the MX Creative Console. Each button tap should trigger a script that controls a specific light. Write a Python script to generate scripts that communicate with the lights via their REST API that I can toggle from the console.

Not the best prompt in the world, but Plan Mode asked me the necessary clarifying questions to put together a plan that the tool could run with.

A couple meetings later when I checked back, my script wizard was done, and my lights now work!

If you want to do something similar (or have a different tool toggle your lights), here’s the repository with all the scripts you need.