ESP32 desk toy that gets twitchy when you overwork Claude

What it does Clawdmeter is a small ESP32 gadget with an AMOLED touchscreen that sits on your desk and displays real-time Claude Code session and weekly usage percentages. A background daemon on your Mac or Linux box polls Anthropic’s API once a minute and beams the stats to the device over Bluetooth Low Energy. The firmware also acts as a BLE HID keyboard, so two side buttons can fire Space and Shift+Tab shortcuts for Claude’s voice mode and agent toggle.

The interesting bit Instead of scraping a billing page, the host daemon makes a dirt-cheap single-token Haiku call and reads usage data straight from the response headers (anthropic-ratelimit-unified-5h-utilization and friends). The firmware tracks how fast your session percentage is climbing and selects pixel-art Clawd animations from matching “mood groups”—the harder you hammer the API, the more frantic the splash screen becomes.

Key highlights

• Auto-rotates splash animations every 20 seconds within the current usage-intensity group
• Thin HAL layer means new Waveshare ESP32 AMOLED boards can be added by dropping in a folder under firmware/src/boards/ without touching the UI code
• Host daemon pulls OAuth tokens automatically from the macOS Keychain or ~/.claude/.credentials.json on Linux
• Ships with tooling to convert Lucide icons and claudepix sprites into LVGL RGB565 C arrays
• Includes a 20k-glyph CJK font and LVGL 9 compatibility patches for custom bitmap fonts

Caveats

• Tightly bound to Claude Code: you need an active subscription and the host daemon has no purpose without it
• The README presents two slightly different screen-navigation models—one describing tap-to-toggle, the other button-cycling through Usage and Bluetooth views—so check which firmware revision you actually flashed

Verdict Grab one if you already have a Waveshare ESP32 AMOLED board on your desk and want a glanceable, slightly judgmental usage gauge. Everyone else can just check their dashboard in the browser.