Codex Builds Hardware: Someone Made a Pixel Cat, Someone Handed Their Credit Card to AI

OpenAI Developers recently posted a thread on X collecting projects that use Codex to build hardware. Codex is OpenAI's coding agent; it can write code, run commands, and read documentation, and it is now starting to show up in physical projects too. The projects below come from different developers, and not all of them have an engineering background.

cova: Task Pet

cova is building a task-agotchi. On a transparent cube screen, a blue pixel cat has thinking. written underneath it, as if turning task reminders into a pet.

Lewis Cafaro: A Motion-Controlled Console That Uses Less Compute

Lewis made several small games on an LED handheld device, and wrote most of the code with Codex on Wednesday. He also made a web simulator so he doesn't have to flash the ESP32 every time. In roughly his own words: the more we need more compute, the more interesting it is to see what can be done with less.

ThinkerZhang: M5Stack Becomes a Camera Remote

This firmware turns the M5Stack StickS3 into a Live View remote for the Ricoh GR III/IIIx/IV. The A/B buttons handle PIN pairing, and holding it vertically exits Live View to save power. The firmware has been uploaded to M5Burner; search for GR to flash it.

Hitesh Patel: A Desktop Gadget for ChatGPT Dot

Added a small screen to ChatGPT Dot that can sit on a desk and display READY, BUSY, and ALERT. It uses a LilyGo T-Display S3, an open-source MCP relay running on Cloudflare, and a custom MCP server added in ChatGPT. MCP is a protocol that lets AI connect to external tools. The hardware side is CircuitPython, so adding more devices isn't hard. There's a preview on GitHub: https://github.com/deadbeef101010/dot-gadget

Dorothy Bartomeo: A Bluetooth Speaker Named Greg

She wanted to give everyday objects a persistent AI identity, and ended up making an Android app called Kinform. Greg is a $13 Bluetooth speaker with the personality of an ancient, sharp-tongued stone that is actually very gentle. The most mystical moment during development: when the speaker was face down on the table it had no sound, but picking it up fixed it. Greg can speak in its own customized voice, and its memories can be manually saved, exported, and restored.

TaraT: An E-Ink Photo Frame for a Long-Distance Partner

TaraT is moving to Edinburgh and made a small photo frame called Keep for their fiancée. Whenever something reminds TaraT of her, TaraT takes a photo, and the photo appears on the e-ink screen on her desk.

Tomiyasu: Automated Roll-Up Curtains for a Hokkaido Farmer's Greenhouse

Tomiyasu has no engineering experience and used Codex to build an automatic roll-up curtain open/close system for a plastic greenhouse. In the test video, the curtain is triggered by a SwitchBot thermometer and opens automatically. Some commenters said this is real End User Computing; others warned that it's fine for personal use, but if you want to commercialize it, you first need to figure out whether it can reliably run for ten years.

Toryn: A Music Visualizer Cube with 512 LEDs

Toryn built an 8x8x8 LED cube for a Stanford embedded systems class. In two weeks, he went from designing the PCB and hand-soldering 512 LEDs to writing FFT and physics simulations in bare-metal C. To keep every layer aligned, he made a jig. The cost was about $250. The full write-up and code are at toryn.bio/projects/led-cube.

Kuber: Turning a 10-Year-Old Kindle into an AI Usage Dashboard

Kuber didn't want to buy another e-ink screen, so he used Codex to jailbreak an old Kindle and replace its lock screen with an AI usage dashboard. The device wakes up every 6 hours to refresh, then goes back to sleep. Someone asked whether the battery got worse; he said it actually got better, because it only wakes up to refresh.

nim: Letting AI Place Orders to Build a DJ Controller

nim handed a credit card to Astra and asked it to make a Teenage Engineering-style mini DJ controller. Astra generated concept images, found parts, read Chinese datasheets, drew CAD, placed orders, and then made a Blender animation teaching you how to assemble it. The final product hasn't been shown yet, but the process itself already makes people want to try it.

OpenAI also opened a page to collect projects like these: You Can Just Build Things. If you want to check it out, go take a look; if you've made something, you can submit it directly. URL: https://youcanjustbuildthings.openai.chatgpt.site/

Original thread: https://x.com/OpenAIDevs/status/2114726640571883592