IAMLIUBO has written firmware for the M5Stack Core2 IoT controller to reproduce the features of the $230 Codex Micro macro pad for OpenAI’s AI coding agent platform, enabling developers to more easily monitor and control agents.
The original is neat with a CNC-milled enclosure, a rotary encoder, and a joystick, but it’s rather pricey (and now out of stock), only ships to the US, and the company has now launched pre-orders for a 25-key “Custom Alternative” going for $125. However, you can easily reproduce the same functionality with other macro pads with rotary encoders, such as the SayoDevice O3C, DuckyPad Pro, Waveshare MK10, T-Keyboard-S3 Pro, and others at a fraction of the price by simply remapping the keys.
IAMLIUBO went another route with the M5Stack Core2 IoT controller since it doesn’t come with any keys. Instead, he leveraged the 2-inch touchscreen LCD of the ESP32 device with six agent keys, six command keys, four analog-stick directions, and dial actions. The firmware presents the Core2 as a BLE vendor HID device matching Work Louder’s Codex Micro data, and the task status colors, battery state, command remapping, and push-to-talk integration are handled by the ChatGPT desktop app. It’s been tested on the macOS app, but it should also work on the Windows version. ChatGPT desktop is not available for Linux yet.
The firmware is built with PlatformIO with the Arduino framework, and you’ll find the source code, instructions to get started, and technical documentation on GitHub. It’s probably best for people who already own an M5Stack Core2 device, but you can also purchase one on Amazon ($59.90) or AliExpress for $46.90 before shipping and taxes.
It’s not quite the first time we’ve written about this type of hardware device for AI agents, since Anthropic released the open-source Claude Desktop Buddy firmware for ESP32-S3 devices, notably the M5StickC Plus devkit, and the Clawdmeter ESP32-S3-powered Claude Code token usage monitor. More recently, I was also tipped off about the Claudeq project, which works like Claude Desktop Buddy but over WiFi/WebSocket instead of BLE.
Jean-Luc started CNX Software in 2010 as a part-time endeavor, before quitting his job as a software engineering manager, and starting to write daily news, and reviews full time later in 2011.
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Even after reading codex micro’s page, I still don’t understand the purpose of this thing at all. It seems to be just a keyboard with rgb backlight under the keys, successfully surfing on the OpenAI brand to create some hype around something totally useless. It seems to me that it’s gone beyond the e-waste principle: if now there’s a new concept consisting in buying a new keyboard for each application, the world is seriously getting crazy and we quickly need to extinguish it.