Turn the knobs, sliders and buttons on your PCPanel into physical controls for everything on your PC: per-app volume, your microphone, Discord voice, OBS scenes, media playback, keyboard shortcuts and more.
This is third-party, community-maintained software for PCPanel hardware. It is a drop-in alternative to the official app that adds features and bug fixes requested by the community.
Not affiliated with PCPanel / getpcpanel.com. The original, official software lives here. This project's version numbering is independent — it started at 1.0 from a fork of the official 2.2.1 release.
A PCPanel is a small USB desk controller with knobs, sliders and buttons — many with RGB lighting. On its own the hardware does nothing; this app is the brain that decides what each control should do.
You bind each knob, slider and button to an action, and the app translates physical movement into real changes on your system in real time:
- Per-application volume — give Discord, Spotify, your game and your browser each their own physical knob. Mute with a button press.
- Device & default-output control — set the volume of any output/input device, toggle mute, or flip the Windows default playback device from a button.
- "Focused app" volume — one knob that always controls whatever window you're currently using.
- Media & keyboard — play/pause/skip, send any keystroke or shortcut combo, launch or close a program.
- RGB lighting — pick colors per control, with effects, and a global brightness knob whose level follows the dial across every profile.
- Profiles — keep different mappings for gaming, streaming and work, and switch between them from a button, automatically on app focus, or by turning a single dial through its ranges (a "stepped switch"). A base layer profile supplies fallback actions, lighting and mute colors for any control your other profiles leave unset.
- Integrations — drive OBS (scenes, source mute/volume, and streaming, recording, virtual
camera and replay-buffer controls), Voicemeeter, Elgato Wave Link (incl. routing the
focused app's volume to its Wave Link channel) and Home Assistant (run any action from a
button, or map a dial to a value such as a light's brightness or color temperature). Send to
anything with generic HTTP request, MQTT publish and OSC send actions — a dial maps its
position into the request via
{{ value }}. - Discord voice — mute/deafen yourself or locally mute another member, set your mic or output volume (or how loud you hear a specific person), join or leave a voice channel, share your screen and toggle your camera — all from your knobs and buttons, with the mute colour following your live Discord state. You register your own free Discord app once (the settings page walks you through it).
An optional on-screen overlay briefly shows the level as you turn a knob, and the app lives in the system tray so it stays out of your way.
Click any control to configure it. Each knob has independent turn, single-press, double-press and on-release slots (the last makes push-to-talk easy — unmute on press, mute on release), an input-mapping curve, and per-control color — and you pick an action from a categorized menu covering audio, system and every integration:
Light the device however you like — solid, rainbow, wave, breath, or fully per-control colors — with a live preview that animates on the hardware as you edit:
The PCPanel Mini, Pro and RGB are all supported out of the box, with zero setup — just plug in over USB (no drivers required; the device is a standard USB HID peripheral).
The app is no longer PCPanel-only. A generalized device layer lets other controllers drive the same actions through the same UI, described by their capabilities (which knobs/sliders/buttons they have, their value ranges, and any lights):
- Deej — the open-source Arduino serial volume mixer. Add it by choosing its serial port; each slider binds to the same actions as a PCPanel dial. (Deej is sliders only — no buttons or lights.)
- MIDI controllers (in progress) — faders, knobs and pads from a standard MIDI device.
PCPanel hardware keeps its tailored, zero-configuration experience; PCPanel simply becomes one of several device "providers".
Grab the latest installer from the Releases page.
The newest stable release is pinned at the top; in-progress development builds are published as
snapshot pre-releases on the same page. Each release lists a changelog and a set of download assets.
The app ships as a self-contained native executable — no Java installation is required.
| Platform | Asset | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| Windows | PCPanel-<version>-setup.exe |
Recommended. See below. |
| Linux | pcpanel_<version>_amd64.deb (or Flatpak / AppImage) |
Best-effort — see linux.md. |
| macOS | PCPanel-<version>-<arch>.dmg |
Experimental — see mac.md. Pick aarch64 for Apple Silicon, x86_64 for Intel. |
The
Source codeasset attached to releases is not needed to run the app.
Run PCPanel-<version>-setup.exe. It's a per-user install — no administrator rights needed; it
installs into your user profile (%LOCALAPPDATA%). The installer can launch the app when it finishes
and offers to start PCPanel automatically when you sign in to Windows. You can optionally grant it
administrator privileges at login (set up as a scheduled task), which is required if you want PCPanel
to control the volume of apps that run elevated.
Linux is best-effort. Device access needs a udev rule (granting your user access to the device's
hidraw node) and a couple of helper packages; the .deb installs the rule for you, but AppImage,
Flatpak and manual installs must add it themselves. Full instructions, including autostart and Wayland
tray setup, are in linux.md.
macOS support is experimental and community-contributed. Device volume, mute and default-device switching work; per-application volume is not possible on stock macOS. The app is unsigned, so Gatekeeper needs a one-time workaround. See mac.md for installation and required permissions.
On first launch the app looks for a profile from the official software and offers to import it. If that doesn't happen automatically, or you want to redo it later, copy the settings file manually:
from: %localappdata%\PCPanel Software\save.json
to: %userprofile%\.pcpanel\profiles.json
- Something broken, or an idea for a feature? Open an issue on the issue tracker. The issue templates list the information that helps most — please be as complete as you can.
- Want to hack on it? See CONTRIBUTING.md for build and development setup.
Bundled third-party components keep their own licenses (for example, kdotool, shipped with the
Linux artifacts, is Apache-2.0).