Keep Tabs on Claude with the Cute, Animated Clawdmeter

A good AI-powered coding assistant can give an engineer a decent boost in productivity, but it’s important to keep a close eye on usage levels. Those tokens don’t come cheap, and you don’t want any nasty surprises on your bill at the end of the month. Even if you have a fixed-price plan, you don’t want to find yourself running out of code completions when you need them the most.

Hermann Björgvin has come up with a clever way to monitor Claude Code usage. It is a dedicated device called Clawdmeter that makes it easy to see exactly where you stand at a glance. The device even has some cute animations to keep you informed if you’d prefer that over traditional progress indicators.

The Clawdmeter only requires a single hardware platform: a Waveshare ESP32-S3 2.16-inch AMOLED Display Development Board. It comes equipped with a powerful ESP32-S3 microcontroller, a 480×480-pixel display, programmable buttons, and a professional-looking enclosure. An optional LiPo battery allows the device to operate without a wired USB connection.

Once flashed with custom firmware, the little desktop companion pairs with a host computer over Bluetooth and continuously tracks Claude Code utilization. A daemon running under Linux polls Anthropic’s API every 60 seconds using the user’s existing Claude credentials. This provides both session and weekly utilization percentages, as well as reset timers. The data is then transmitted to the handheld display over a custom BLE GATT service using lightweight JSON payloads.

The Clawdmeter boots into an animated splash screen featuring pixel-art “Clawd” sprites sourced from the open-source claudepix library. As utilization rises, the animations become more frantic and energetic, offering a visual indicator of consumption levels without forcing the user to constantly focus on numbers. A tap on the touchscreen toggles between the splash animation and more detailed status displays, including usage statistics and Bluetooth connection information.

The left button on the device functions as a push-to-talk trigger for Claude Code voice mode by transmitting a Space keypress over BLE HID, while the right button sends Shift+Tab for mode switching. Because the device behaves as a standard Bluetooth keyboard, those shortcuts work system-wide with whichever application currently has focus.

Björgvin documented the project thoroughly for anyone interested in reproducing or modifying it. The repository includes firmware sources, Linux daemon scripts, font conversion instructions for LVGL 9 compatibility, and tooling used to scrape and convert Clawd animation frames into embedded RGB565 assets for the AMOLED display. All of the details are available in the project’s GitHub repository.