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Pixel Buds Pro

by alinuxfan

Pixel Buds Pro in the Omarchy bar: per-bud and case battery, ANC/Transparency/Adaptive mode, multipoint, on-head detection, speech detection and hearing-safety notifications.

GitHub

Security review

Potentially dangerous behavior detected · 4 findings

Deterministic scan — not a security guarantee

High
Risk level
High
Analyzed commit
6ae8171
Scanned
1 month ago
  • high persistence daemon/pixelbudsd.service:1

    Bundles a systemd unit file.

    [Unit]
  • Docs package_manager daemon/README.md:41

    System package manager operation.

    apt-get install libdbus-1-dev pkg-config
  • Docs sudo daemon/README.md:38

    Command runs with sudo, elevating the process beyond the plugin environment.

    sudo pacman -S dbus
  • Docs sudo daemon/README.md:41

    Command runs with sudo, elevating the process beyond the plugin environment.

    sudo apt-get install libdbus-1-dev pkg-config

Automated analysis only — not a security guarantee.

AI advisory review

No obvious issues detected

Language-model assessment · ~deepseek/deepseek-v4-flash-latest — advisory only

Low
AI risk level
Low
Recommendation
install
Model
~deepseek/deepseek-v4-flash-latest
Analyzed commit
6ae8171
Reviewed
1 month ago

The plugin is a QML bar widget that reads a status file and invokes a separate pixelbudsctl binary with fixed verbs; the bundled Rust daemon is a straightforward Bluetooth/Maestro client with a properly restricted control socket. The deterministic scan's high rating comes from README build commands and a user-level systemd unit, both documentation/manual-install artifacts rather than code executed by the plugin. No obfuscation, credential theft, or destructive behavior was found.

  • The bundled systemd unit is a user service that only runs if the user manually follows the documented install steps; it is not installed or enabled by the plugin itself.
  • The README's sudo package-manager commands are standard build-dependency instructions for D-Bus headers, not part of plugin execution.
  • The daemon's control socket is correctly restricted to 0700 under XDG_RUNTIME_DIR and refuses to fall back to a world-visible location.
How this check works

This review combines the deterministic scan (the rule-based results above) with an independent look at the plugin's code by a language model. The model reads a trimmed sample of the repository's files, the manifest, and the README, then gives a plain-language risk level and a recommendation: install (no notable danger), review (look closer first), or avoid (clearly dangerous).

It runs on the same analyzed commit as the deterministic scan and is strictly advisory — it is not a security guarantee and never blocks a plugin by itself. A human moderator still reviews plugins before they are listed.

AI advisory only — automated analysis, not a security guarantee.

Install
$ omarchy plugin add https://github.com/alinuxfan/omarchy-pixelbuds --enable
Hardware #bar
<h1 align="center">Pixel Buds Pro for Omarchy</h1> <p align="center"> Battery for each bud and the case, ANC mode, Multipoint, on-head detection, Speech Detection and hearing-safety notifications, drawn in Omarchy's own panel idiom. </p> <p align="center"> Follows the shape of <a href="https://github.com/thisisgm/omarchy-pods">omarchy-pods</a>, the AirPods panel for Omarchy, adapted to what Pixel Buds Pro actually expose over Google's Maestro protocol. </p>

What it shows

  • Battery for the left bud, the right bud and the case, each with a charging hint and, for the buds, whether they're sitting in the case. Nothing else on a Linux box knows these numbers: this comes from the Maestro RFCOMM channel, not org.bluez.Battery1.
  • ANC mode — Off, Active (Noise Cancellation), Aware (Transparency) or Adaptive. All four are always present; unlike AirPods, Maestro does not vary the mode list by model.
  • Multipoint, Speech Detection (auto-Transparency when you start talking) and Volume Notifications (hearing-safety warnings), as toggles.
  • On-head detection, as a toggle. Maestro exposes this as a plain on/off setting rather than AirPods' three-way pause behavior.

Deliberately absent

  • Volume and output device live in the stock Audio panel.
  • Connect, disconnect and forget live in the stock Bluetooth panel, and in omarchy bluetooth device.
  • 5-band EQ, volume balance, mono output, gesture mapping, auto-OTA, diagnostics are real Maestro settings this daemon's own libraries can read and write, but none has a row here. See knowledge/plugin-design-decisions.md for why.

Requirements

  • The daemon in daemon/, built and running. Unlike omapods' AirPods daemon, this one is not a vendored fork: it depends directly on the maestro crate from qzed/pbpctrl, which already implements the protocol as a proper library. See daemon/README.md.
  • Pixel Buds Pro paired to the machine through the usual Bluetooth flow.

Compatibility

Nothing this plugin depends on is specific to one Pixel Buds model — pixelbudsd looks for any paired device advertising the Maestro service UUID and speaks whatever that device answers with. In practice that means compatibility tracks whichever Pixel Buds actually run Maestro (the settings/ANC/battery protocol the real Google Buds app uses), not which model this README happens to name.

Model Released ANC Tested with this plugin
Pixel Buds Pro 2 2024 Yes ✅ Confirmed — see knowledge/log.md for what was verified and when
Pixel Buds Pro 2022 Yes Untested. pbpctrl, the library this daemon depends on, was itself written against this model, so it's the most likely of the untested ones to work
Pixel Buds 2a 2025 Yes Untested. Shares the Pro 2's Tensor A1 chip and design language, so plausibly Maestro-compatible, but not verified here
Pixel Buds A-Series 2021 No Untested, and likely unsupported — no ANC or on-device settings surface to suggest this hardware speaks Maestro at all
Pixel Buds (2nd gen) 2020 No Untested, likely unsupported for the same reason
Pixel Buds (1st gen) 2017 No Untested, likely unsupported — predates Fast Pair and the wireless charging case entirely

If you run this on a model other than Pixel Buds Pro 2, please open an issue with what you saw (RUST_LOG=pixelbudsd=debug,maestro=info, per knowledge/not-measured-on-hardware.md) so this table can grow past one confirmed row.

How it works

The plugin does not poll. The daemon writes its status to $XDG_STATE_HOME/pixelbudspro/status.json whenever that status changes, and removes the file when it stops. The panel watches it with a FileView, so an idle desktop runs no processes at all on its behalf. pixelbudsctl is spawned only when you actually change something, over a control socket at $XDG_RUNTIME_DIR/pixelbudspro.sock.

The plugin never talks to Bluetooth itself. If pixelbudsctl is missing or the daemon is not running, the panel says so in one line instead of drawing an empty surface.

Install

omarchy plugin add https://github.com/alinuxfan/omarchy-pixelbuds --enable
omarchy bar move io.github.alinuxfan.pixelbudspro

Then build the daemon out of the copy that just cloned, and hand it to systemd. Building it needs a Rust toolchain and D-Bus development headers (dbus on Arch, libdbus-1-dev pkg-config on Debian/Ubuntu):

cd ~/.config/omarchy/plugins/io.github.alinuxfan.pixelbudspro/daemon
cargo build --release
install -Dm755 target/release/pixelbudsd "$HOME/.local/bin/pixelbudsd"
install -Dm755 target/release/pixelbudsctl "$HOME/.local/bin/pixelbudsctl"
install -Dm644 pixelbudsd.service "$HOME/.config/systemd/user/pixelbudsd.service"
systemctl --user daemon-reload
systemctl --user enable --now pixelbudsd.service

~/.local/bin is where the unit expects the binaries and where the panel finds pixelbudsctl; Omarchy already puts it on PATH. The unit is bound to graphical-session.target, so the daemon comes back after a reboot.

Remove

systemctl --user disable --now pixelbudsd.service
rm -f ~/.local/bin/pixelbudsd ~/.local/bin/pixelbudsctl ~/.config/systemd/user/pixelbudsd.service
omarchy plugin remove io.github.alinuxfan.pixelbudspro

Keyboard

Key Action
j / k, ↓ / ↑ move between rows
enter / space activate the current row
o ANC Off
n Noise Cancellation (Active)
t Transparency (Aware)
a Adaptive
m toggle Multipoint
h toggle on-head detection
s toggle Speech Detection
v toggle Volume Notifications
r refresh
tab move to the next panel
esc close

Left click opens the panel. Right click cycles the ANC mode without opening anything.

Settings

Setting Default Notes
Hide when disconnected on Leaves the bar entirely rather than sitting there with nothing to say.
Path to pixelbudsctl empty Leave empty to find it on PATH.

Tests

Model.js holds the parsing and formatting, with no QML imports, so it runs outside the shell:

deno run --allow-read tests/model.test.js

daemon/ has its own unit tests, plus a real compile-and-link check against the maestro crate:

cd daemon && cargo test --workspace && cargo clippy --workspace --all-targets

A caveat worth reading before you file an issue

This plugin was originally built without a Pixel Buds unit connected to the machine it was written on, and has since been verified end-to-end against real Pixel Buds Pro 2 hardware — battery, ANC, and every toggle round-trip correctly, and a couple of real bugs turned up and got fixed in the process. See knowledge/log.md for exactly what was tested and when, and the Compatibility table above for which other models remain unverified. knowledge/not-measured-on-hardware.md still holds for any model that table lists as untested; please open an issue with what you actually saw on first real pairing.

Credits

The hard part is not this panel, or even this daemon: it's pbpctrl by Maximilian Luz, which recovered Google's Maestro protocol and shipped it as reusable, permissively licensed Rust crates. daemon/pixelbudsd is a thin wrapper around that work, depending on maestro as a normal Cargo git dependency rather than a vendored fork.

Licence

MIT, see LICENSE. daemon/'s own dependency on maestro and gfps is dual MIT/Apache-2.0 upstream; see daemon/README.md.