ClaudePanel — Display Firmware

Not sure where to start? Begin at the plugin site — that’s the system overview and install walkthrough that gets your Claude Code session talking to the panel.

Flash the ESP32-S3 firmware that drives the ClaudePanel external status display. Plug your board in via USB-C, pick it below, click Flash.

WebSerial unsupported — use Chrome / Edge. WebSerial requires HTTPS. WebSerial unsupported — use Chrome / Edge. WebSerial requires HTTPS.

• Wiring & pinouts: Thing Plus · Lonely Binary
• Build your own — parts list, ~$50–80 total.
• Adding a new board (CONTRIBUTING.md)

Reading the panel

Once your bridge is talking to a flashed board, the panel reports the state of your Claude Code session in real time. A few behaviors worth knowing up front:

• BLOCKED strobes red. The one state that demands your attention — strobes hard until acknowledged so you can’t miss it from across the room.
• The dev board’s BOOT button is a single context-sensitive ack. What it does depends on what’s loudest at the moment of the press:
  1. Loud BLOCKED strobe? First press silences it — BLOCKED drops into a calm steady glow. The state stays visible, you just stop being yelled at. Auto-clears the next time nothing on the panel is blocked, so the next blocked event re-alarms fresh.
  2. Already silenced, or nothing blocked? The press toggles AFK instead. So “I see it, going to lunch” is two presses: silence, then AFK. The panel dims to ~10% with no animation, no strobing, no RX pulses — and a large blue AFK is composed over the middle of each panel as a “you parked this, press to wake” reminder. Even if a fresh BLOCKED arrives while you’re gone, your neighbors get nothing but a faint glow.
  3. Coming back? Press once to exit AFK. If a block is still active, it’s auto-silenced on wake so the panel doesn’t start strobing the moment you sit down. AFK persists across state changes — Claude finishing a task while you’re away won’t light the panel up.
• Auto-AFK after ~30 s of bridge silence. Catches “Pause subscription” tray clicks, host sleep, and USB unplug with the same calm visual. Self-clears on the first byte from the bridge.
• Screensaver after 5 minutes of quiet. Same dim look as AFK but without the blue AFK overlay — that’s the visual triage cue. If you see big blue letters, you have to press the button to wake; if it’s just dim, any new state update will wake it. Screensaver auto-engages when every pinned slot has been IDLE or BLOCKED for the full timeout.
• Bottom-left heartbeat pixel. Green when bytes are flowing from the bridge (within the last 10 s); red when they aren’t. Combined with auto-AFK you get a two-stage signal: red dot at 10 s (“nothing’s flowing”), panel dim at 30 s (“you’re fully away”).

Browser support

WebSerial works in Chrome, Edge, and other Chromium-based browsers — Firefox and Safari don’t. For those, use esptool with the .tar.gz archives attached to each release.

Related projects

• Plugin — system entry point; install starts here.
• Bridge — daemon that translates Claude Code events into wire frames for the firmware.
• Wire-protocol spec — canonical, lives at the root of the bridge repo.