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Lonely Binary ESP32-S3 N16R8 Gold Edition

Wiring & flash instructions for ClaudePanel display firmware.

What you’ll need

Wiring

HUB75 → GPIO map

All HUB75 pins on this board live on the left header, GPIO 4–16 contiguously — a clean ribbon-cable layout. Conventional R/G/B order, no swaps. Pin 8 (E) on the panel’s IDC is unused on a 1/16-scan panel; leave it disconnected.

IDC pin # Color / signal ESP32 GPIO
1 R (top half) GPIO 4
2 B (top half) ★ GPIO 5
3 G (top half) ★ GPIO 6
4 GND any GND pin
5 R (bottom half) GPIO 7
6 B (bottom half) ★ GPIO 8
7 G (bottom half) ★ GPIO 9
8 E (NC on 1/16-scan) —
9 A (row select) GPIO 10
10 B (row select) GPIO 11
11 C (row select) GPIO 12
12 D (row select) GPIO 13
13 CLK GPIO 14
14 LAT GPIO 15
15 OE GPIO 16
16 GND any GND pin

★ Panel-quirk note: on the WaveShare RGB-Matrix-P2.5-64×32 panel, IDC pins 2 and 3 (and 6 and 7) are swapped vs the HUB75 standard — pin 2 internally drives the blue channel, pin 3 drives green. The firmware compensates so that the natural sequential wiring above renders colors correctly. If you substitute a different (HUB75-spec-compliant) panel, edit main/board_config.h to swap g1↔b1 and g2↔b2 back to conventional order.

Board pinout reference

Lonely Binary ESP32-S3 N16R8 Gold Edition header pinout
Image © Lonely Binary, used with attribution. Source.

Pins to avoid on this board

The N16R8 module uses octal PSRAM, which means GPIO 33–38 are reserved internally by the chip even though some of them appear on the right header (you’ll see SUBSPI* labels). Don’t try to use those for HUB75 or anything else — they’ll fight the PSRAM. GPIO 19/20 are the native USB lines, GPIO 43/44 are UART0 (logging), GPIO 48 is the onboard RGB LED.

Power

Flash this board

Plug the ESP32-S3 into your computer with a USB-C cable, then click below. Chrome, Edge, or another Chromium-based browser is required.

Your browser doesn't support WebSerial. Try Chrome, Edge, or another Chromium-based browser. WebSerial requires HTTPS. Make sure you're on https://.

Verify it works

  1. Power the panel from your external 5 V supply.
  2. After flashing finishes, the panel should show “…” in dim blue near the center, with a slow-breathing blue border. That’s the firmware’s “unknown” state — the chip is alive but no host has sent it any state yet.

  3. Quick smoke test from a terminal (macOS):

    PORT=/dev/cu.usbmodem*    # tab-complete to the real path
stty -f $PORT 115200 cs8 -cstopb -parenb raw
echo '{"state":"working","subagent_count":2}' > $PORT

    Panel should switch to amber WORKING with a faster pulsing border and two amber bars near the bottom edge.

The ack button

The BOOT button on your dev board is a single context-sensitive ack — each press resolves the loudest thing on the panel.

What happens on each press

  1. Loud BLOCKED strobe? First press silences it. The strobing stops, BLOCKED text + indicators drop to a calm muted appearance, the state stays visible. The silence auto-clears once no slot on this ESP is blocked anymore, 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 while standing at the panel: 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 a fresh BLOCKED arriving while you’re gone renders calm and dim — 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 itself persists across state changes — the panel stays dim until you press again, even if Claude finishes a long-running task while you’re away.

Auto-AFK on bridge silence

The panel also dims itself automatically when no bytes have arrived from the bridge for 30 seconds — long enough to rule out a hiccup, short enough to feel responsive. This catches “Pause subscription” tray clicks, bridge crashes, host sleep, and USB unplug with the same calm visual. Auto-AFK self-clears the moment any byte arrives again.

The bottom-left bridge-heartbeat pixel goes red 10 seconds into a silence and stays red until bytes resume; auto-AFK kicks in 20 seconds after that. Two stages, easy to read.

On this board GPIO 0 is wired only to the BOOT button (no LED conflict), so it’s a clean, reliable input.

Optional: wire your own button

If you want a button somewhere more reachable than the dev board itself (e.g., taped to your desk near your keyboard), wire a momentary push button between any free GPIO and a GND pin. Then edit BoardPins.ack_button in main/board_config.h to that GPIO number, rebuild, and flash.

No external pull-up resistor needed — the firmware enables the ESP32’s internal pull-up (~45 kΩ).

For long wire runs (more than ~30 cm) or electrically noisy environments, an external 10 kΩ resistor between the GPIO and 3V3 adds noise immunity but isn’t required. Mechanical bounce is already handled in firmware (60 ms debounce), so a bypass capacitor is unnecessary.

Optional: hardware OE pull-up

At chip reset, OE (GPIO 16) is briefly high-impedance before the firmware takes over — this can cause a quick visual flash on the panel at boot. To suppress it, solder a 10 kΩ resistor between OE and 3V3. The firmware’s early-OE-high block in app_main() trims the window further but a hardware pull-up is the clean fix.

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