A few weeks ago, we open-sourced our design for a cost-effective but full featured alternative to OpenAI x Work Louder's sold out Codex Micro macropad. And now, we're pleased to share that we've actually built them and they work!

Quick recap of the I/O: - 13 assignable keys with individual LEDs - rotary encoder - joystick - touch disc - optional edge-lit LED band

The cool part for us was just HOW our agent was able to do it when every other agentic skills, tools, and even commercial platforms failed. We put together a more detailed writeup in the linked blog post (plus pretty pictures!), but long story short, we asked our agentic scientist, Marvin, to treat the electrical engineering as a research problem.

Marvin was able to synthesize vast technical documents and best practice guidelines (e.g. scientific literature), test specific placement and routing strategies (e.g. experiments), and selectively backtrack and combine learnings (e.g. interpreting data analysis). The end result was a fully routed board (made especially challenging by some hard constraints to keep cost down) plus a reusable runbook worfklow that demonstrated Marvin's ability to enter an unfamiliar domain, learn and improve through experimentation, and unlock novel capabilities.

Some future work we've got marinating in our mind grapes: - an app for cross coding agent compatibility (shoutout to lop1381997 for contributing a codex-native firmware) - optional OLED screen, something like an SSD1306 that could fit right into the space between the knob and joystick - optional base with bluetooth and battery for full wireless functionality

Let us know what you think, have any ideas or feature requests, and share pictures if you build it!

Repo: https://github.com/yuz207/agentpad13 Configurator: https://yuz207.github.io/agentpad13/configurator/site/

Show HN: AI scientist builds an open-source Codex Micro from scratch for $40