sixsigmaengineer/claude-status-bar-lilygo

Claude Status Bar is a small desk display built around a LilyGo T-Display S3 board that shows what Claude is doing in real time. It reports the current model, which tool is running, elapsed time, tokens sent and received, context usage, and your 5-hour and 7-day rate limit bars, and it works with both Claude Desktop, sometimes called Cowork, and Claude Code, tracking up to four sessions at once. The hardware is a single LilyGo T-Display S3 Long board, an ESP32-S3 microcontroller with a 3.4 inch color touchscreen, which costs around 25 dollars and connects to your PC with one USB-C cable that handles both power and data. No battery is required since the display stays plugged into your computer, though the board does have a connector for one if you want to add it later. Behind the scenes, a Python program running on your PC watches the JSONL transcript files that Claude Code and Claude Desktop write to disk, figures out what each session is doing, and either polls Anthropic's usage API for your real rate limits or estimates them locally from token counts. It streams this information over USB serial to the display's firmware, which renders it on screen and responds to touch and a physical button. Each session moves through simple states such as running, showing a specific tool, waiting on you for permission or an answer, or done, and the display automatically follows whichever session is most active, jumping to one that needs your attention with an orange alert. Setup on Windows involves installing Python 3.10 or newer, running a PowerShell script that downloads the ESP32 toolchain and flashes the firmware onto the board, then running a bridge program either as a desktop app with a live preview and a system tray icon, or as a headless background process that can start automatically at login. You can also upload a custom logo image to the display, choosing from included starter icons or your own picture, and it is saved on the device so it survives reboots. The project is released under the MIT license.