Clawdmeter turns your Claude Code usage statistics into a small desktop dashboard

The idea for the project came from Herman Haraldsson, a software developer based in Reykjavik, Iceland, who says he had always wanted to experiment with embedded devices but never had the time before.

“I’m not an embedded developer or anything like that,” Haraldsson told TechCrunch in a phone call. But he said Claude was able to guide him through the project in just a few days. “It’s really democratized access to programming, so now anyone can do what developers used to do. I think that’s a really positive thing, actually.”

Most of the time he spent building the device was focused on the design, making sure he got the font, colors, and small animations right.

To create your own dashboard, you can use a small lithium-ion battery-powered display like the Waveshare ESP32-S3-Touch-AMOLED-2.16, which pairs with your laptop via Bluetooth. When you turn on the device, the splash screen plays a pixel-art Clawd animation that gets busier as usage increases. You can also press the middle button to cycle through different types of animation if you so choose.

“I love it when I’m working, and I think it goes crazy — it’s like a little dopamine loop,” Haraldson says.

The animation stays on screen until you press the middle button, which then displays session data and Claude’s weekly usage data in simple charts.

You can press this button again to go to the Bluetooth screen that displays the connection status and provides the reset feature. From there, you can tap the screen to return to the original splash screen animation.

Meanwhile, the other two side buttons send Spacebar and Shift+Tab via Bluetooth for Claude Code’s audio mode and mode switching shortcuts. The latter allows you to cycle between the default Normal mode, Accept Modifications mode, Plan mode, and Auto mode.

The device keeps up with your usage limits because it reads your Claude Code OAuth token to make an API call, which then pulls usage numbers directly from the response headers, Haraldsson says.

Since Clawdmeter is an open source project, anyone can fork it to add their own features, animations, screens, and more, based on their own interests and needs.

Haraldsson says he was surprised to see that more than 800 people have starred in it on GitHub since it launched on May 10, and that 50 people have already forked the project to develop it themselves. He suspects they like the device because it feels nostalgic.

“There’s a kind of nostalgia for a time when you used to have a device for everything — like a Walkman to play music, or an iPod,” Haraldsson says. (Or as one Redditor put it, Clawdmeter is like “the Tamagotchi of my context window.”)

“I know this doesn’t replace anything — like, you can have this on your computer — but it’s just fun,” Haraldson says.