A macropad for the way
I actually code now.

I kept hitting ⇧⌃⌘4 then ⌘V to send screenshots to Claude. Fifty times a day. So I made a small mechanical keyboard with nine keys and a rotary encoder where the top-left button does the screenshot and the one next to it pastes.

It's open source, programmable in your browser, and assembled in Mexico. First ten prototypes are on my desk; first batch of a hundred ships when I'm sure they work.

$50 · pre-orders open later this year · join the waitlist

What it does well

The top-left key is the one I built this thing for: it fires the macOS region screenshot shortcut so you can drag a selection, then press the key next to it to paste the screenshot wherever your AI chat is focused. Claude Code, Cursor, claude.ai, ChatGPT, Gemini — the keyboard doesn't know which one you're using and doesn't need to.

The rotary encoder on top is the volume knob by default, but you can rebind it to anything — scrolling, undo scrubbing, tab cycling, audio scrubbing in a video editor. Click it to mute. Click it on the Fn layer for something else.

The nine keys use Cherry MX-compatible hot-swap sockets, so you can pull a switch out without soldering and try a different one. Brown tactiles ship by default; clicky blues, silent reds, low-profile chocs all work.

You configure all of it in your browser. Plug the macropad into USB, open VIA (or the Matosic-branded version I'm building at macropad.hrvojematosic.com), drag your bindings, hit save. No app to install, no account, no daemon running in the background. The keyboard remembers your settings forever.

What it doesn't do

There's no screen yet. I keep wanting one that shows how many AI tokens I've burned today, but adding a screen is its own project — it'd need a small daemon on your laptop that reads the token counts from Claude/Cursor's APIs and pushes them over USB. That's v2. This is v1.

There's no RGB. The white per-key LEDs from the original ANAVI design are still on the v0.0.0.17 board, but I'm taking them off for the first commercial run. Less cost, less complexity, and honestly I never look at the LEDs when I'm coding.

There's no microphone, no speaker, no analog input, no wireless. None of those are essential for what this keyboard does, and adding any of them would make shipping later and more expensive. Maybe in v3.

The hardware, in plain English

Inside it: a Raspberry Pi RP2040 chip on a Seeed XIAO module. Same dual-core ARM processor that's in a Pi Pico, just on a smaller breakout. The nine keys are wired as a 3×3 matrix with anti-ghosting diodes, exactly the way mechanical keyboards have done it for forty years. The encoder is an EC11 with a click. USB-C charging is on the XIAO; flashing new firmware is drag-and-drop, no programmer required.

The PCB and case are 3D-printable or fab-orderable; I use JLCPCB in Shenzhen for both the bare boards and the SMT placement, then hand-solder the through-hole parts in Mexico City. If you want to build your own, all the source files are on GitHub.

Heritage

This isn't an original design from scratch. It's forked from the ANAVI Macro Pad 10 by Leon Anavi, under the CC-BY-SA-4.0 license. Leon did the original 9-key + encoder layout, the matrix wiring, the diode placement, the LED chain — all the parts I would have spent six months figuring out from first principles.

I added the workflow-specific firmware, redesigned the silkscreen, picked different switches and case dimensions, and aimed the whole thing at a different audience. But the bones are Leon's, and the license says so on the back of every board.

Open source, top to bottom

Hardware (PCB + case): github.com/matosichrvoje, under CC-BY-SA-4.0. Firmware: same place, under GPL-2.0 (the QMK convention). Configurator: same place, MIT (a fork of VIA).

If you want to make your own version, fork it. If you find a bug, send a PR. If you just want to know how it works inside, all the sources are there.

About me

I'm Hrvoje Matosic. I'm self-taught at hardware and learning by shipping. This is my first commercial product after a year of teaching myself KiCad, soldering, and CircuitPython on evenings and weekends. The first ten boards are imperfect in ways that I'm slowly becoming proud of — the joints look the way joints look when a beginner solders them, and they work.

Email me at hi@hrvojematosic.com. I read everything.

Join the waitlist

I'll send one email when the first hundred units are ready to order, and exactly zero emails before then. No newsletter, no funnel.