Take Control with a $40 AI Command Center

It seems like OpenClaw is everywhere you look lately. Techies can’t stop talking about it, and people are building personal projects around it left and right. And with good reason — AI chatbots may be useful for a number of applications, but as time goes on, people are finding them to be less attractive overall. The initial hype was so great that these tools simply can’t live up to it. However, OpenClaw is making chatbots more useful by sucking in our digital data to automate everything from email responses to flight check-ins.

Lewis Menelaws is a big fan of OpenClaw, but he is not entirely sold on letting the system run his entire digital life without some oversight. Rather than throw the baby out with the bathwater, Menelaws decided to build a personal AI command center that keeps track of everything his OpenClaw installation is doing. This command center provides a simple interface that makes it possible to approve or deny actions before they are executed.

Instead of interacting with an AI through a browser tab, Menelaws envisioned something closer to a “Stream Deck for AI” — a dedicated physical terminal that sits on his desk and quietly watches his digital world. His OpenClaw instance runs a continuous “heartbeat” process that scans for urgent messages, tasks, and notifications. When something important appears, it gets queued on the terminal, waiting for human approval rather than interrupting him with endless chat prompts.

Built for roughly $35–$40 in parts, the command center is powered by a Raspberry Pi 4, which handles networking, interface rendering, and communication with the AI agent. Two displays form the core of the user experience: a 4-inch LCD panel shows a live activity feed, while a 2.8-inch touchscreen provides customizable action buttons. A collection of tactile push buttons and rotary encoder knobs allow quick navigation and confirmations without needing a keyboard or mouse.

The screens were designed primarily for Arduino and ESP32 boards, not a Raspberry Pi, which led to complicated wiring across breadboards and adapter boards. After getting past this difficulty, Menelaws designed a custom enclosure in Fusion 360 and 3D-printed a wedge-shaped case with chunky, low-poly styling and engraved circuit patterns.

He then treated the enclosure like a consumer product prototype. The printed parts were sanded smooth, primed to hide layer lines, and finished with metallic spray paint to create a brushed-metal appearance. To add heft, metal washers were glued inside the housing so the device wouldn’t feel like a hollow plastic toy.

The finished terminal delivers daily briefings, inbox summaries, and six programmable touchscreen buttons capable of launching Python scripts and automations. Rather than demanding attention like a smartphone, the unit quietly surfaces only what matters — letting AI do the busywork while a human remains firmly in control.