
micr0pad
Live AI-agent status lights on a Work Louder macropad, with the bridge running entirely on your own machine.
What it is
micr0pad turns a Work Louder Codex Micro or Creator Micro 2 into a live control surface for AI coding agents. It reads agent state from Herdr, the terminal multiplexer hosting them, and paints that state onto the pad's per-key RGB. One glance tells you which agent is blocked, which is working and which is done.
It is provider neutral by design: Claude Code, Codex, Gemini, Grok, HuggingFace, Ollama, or anything else Herdr runs.
No vendor app is in the loop. The bridge speaks the device's own JSON-RPC over raw HID, and everything it knows about your machine stays on it.
The pad
( dial ) [ agent 1 ] [ agent 2 ] ( toggle ) <- encoder, two keys, joystick
[agent 3] [ agent 4 ] [ agent 5 ] [ agent 6 ] <- the six status keys
[action 1] [action 2] [action 3] [ action 4 ] <- your commands
[ talk (wide) ] [ terminal ]What it does
- Per-key agent status. Six keys, one agent each, colored by state: blocked red, working purple, done blue, idle yellow, with a per-slot identity color so two Claudes can be told apart. The underglow carries the worst state across all of them, so the pad is readable from across the room.
- Browser mirror. Every key, the dial and the joystick, reflecting the physical device in real time.
- Action keys that run your commands. Four action keys plus a terminal key. They ship unconfigured: set a label and a command per key, and they work whether you press the pad or click the button.
- Talk key. Voice to text into the Notes box and the clipboard, with a gold underglow pulse while listening.
- Slot names, colors and outer-light effects edited in the browser and saved to a local config file. Every firmware effect is selectable: solid, pulse, soft pulse, spin, rainbow, gradient, off.
- System panel. CPU, RAM, top processes with end-task, and optional energy, carbon and cost estimates for your own AI sessions with a 30-day trend.
- Pairing and revert. Hand the LEDs back to the firmware for Bluetooth pairing, or restore the device's original keymap.
Hardware
| Device | Work Louder Codex Micro or Creator Micro 2 |
| Verified on | Codex Micro, VID 0x303a PID 0x8360, firmware v0.4.1 |
| Host | Windows. The process list and command launchers use Windows tooling. |
| Needs | Herdr on PATH, Node.js 18 or newer |
Energy reporting is optional and local
The system panel can report modeled energy, carbon and cost for your own agent sessions, using the AiEDs v2 impact model. The hook stamps that version on every row. Reporting is opt-in and entirely local: nothing is recorded until you install the hook, and nothing ever leaves the machine.
The hook reads the session's own transcript, sums the token counts the API actually reported, and appends one line per model to a local log.
Costs are modeled list prices, not a bill. You can edit the rates, and a model with no rate gets no cost figure instead of a guess. In AiEDs v2, energy, carbon and Tree-Time are fixed multiples of each other, so those three lines sit on top of each other on the chart.
Credits
- schacon/micro-manager, the reverse engineering of this device's JSON-RPC surface, its effect table and the key-binding rules. This project would not exist without it.
- Herdr, the agent runtime this reads from.
- Work Louder, the hardware.
Released under the MIT license.


