A standard SteelSeries dongle reflashed for a limited-edition Aerox 5
SteelSeries only sells the standard dongle, which won't pair with edition mice. With Claude Code's help the owner built a tool that flashes the edition firmware SteelSeries GG already downloads onto a standard dongle.
Credits
- Reddit poster oatmeal_foreigner Source ↗
- Repository account StarlaDeer Source ↗
Earliest dated source:
The full story
Limited-edition SteelSeries Aerox 5 Wireless mice (the Destiny 2 Lightfall and Diablo IV editions) only pair with their matching edition dongle, and SteelSeries only sells the standard one. After support told the owner their mouse was now a wired mouse, they found that the edition dongle runs the same code as the standard one with a different USB ID, name and small defaults table: about 120 bytes.
With a lot of help from Claude Code they built a tool that flashes a genuine standard dongle with the edition firmware SteelSeries GG already downloads to the PC, using the updater GG already ships. No SteelSeries firmware is in the repository; the tool checks the local copy against pinned hashes, backs up and verifies the dongle first, offers a dry run, retries or restores on a failed write, and can roll back in one command. The fwupd project's SteelSeries plugin helped explain the update protocol.
The Lightfall conversion is tested on the owner's own mouse; Diablo IV and the Aerox 3 and 9 editions are untested or experimental. It can brick a dongle and may void the warranty.
How it was done
Tools
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Sources
From a short post by the maker, so the details are as they tell them.
- Reddit: SteelSeries won't sell you a replacement dongle for limited-edition Aerox 5s, so I wrote a free toolReddit poster: oatmeal_foreignerPosted
The owner's post in r/techsupport.
- The code: github.comRepository account: StarlaDeer
The tool's repository, with safety notes and supported editions.