An engineer reverse engineered the undocumented Mikey chip (I2C address 0x72) in the iPod Classic that handles Apple wired earbud remote buttons, brute-forcing through all 256 mode register values to find that 0x2f enables button reporting. The chip has quirks — its event engine sleeps after ~5 seconds and reports button releases 1.8 seconds late. A Rockbox driver is now under review upstream, with a prebuilt image available for iPod Classic 6G/7G.
Background
The iPod Classic's inline remote chip (codename "Mikey") was never documented by Apple, leaving Rockbox users without support for earbud button controls for over a decade. Prior reverse engineering work on the chip existed only on a defunct blog, preserved via wiki mirror.
- Source
- Lobsters
- Published
- Sep 28, 2026 at 03:58 AM
- Score
- 5.0 / 10