Silicon Valley’s TokenMax era has its own hardware. A new open-source project displays usage statistics for Claude code in a small desktop dashboard, allowing AI power users to monitor usage.
Sure, you can track Clawd code usage directly in your device using commands and other external tools and apps, but it’s not quite as fun as watching a pixel art version of Clawd sprites dance across your screen before displaying at-a-glance token usage information, right?
The device, dubbed the “Clawdmeter,” is both a fun side project for AI power users and a timely demonstration of how thoroughly Anthropic’s Claude has penetrated the developer community and the growing interest in tokenmaxxing. In this new “productivity” trend, software engineers at various technology companies are maximizing the number of AI tokens consumed at work as an indicator of how well they embrace AI.
When one Reddit user first saw the project, he joked, “Anthropic should mail these for free at this point.”
Another suggestion suggested adding a button to increase capacity or refill tokens using cards on file. (Ha, that might be dangerous!)
The idea for this project comes from Hermann Haraldsson, a software developer based in Reykjavík, Iceland. He says he’s always wanted to play with embedded devices but never had the time.
“I’m not an embedded developer or anything,” Haraldsson told TechCrunch by phone. But Claude was able to explain the project in just a few days, he said. “It’s really democratized access to programming, allowing anyone to do what developers used to do. I actually think this is a very positive thing.”
Most of the time he spent building the device was focused on the design, getting the fonts, colors, and small animations just right.
To build your own dashboard, you can use a small lithium-ion battery-powered display like the Waveshare ESP32-S3-Touch-AMOLED-2.16 that pairs with your laptop via Bluetooth. When you turn on the device, a pixel art Clawd animation plays on the splash screen, which gets busier as usage increases. If you want, you can also press the middle button to switch between different types of animations.
“When you’re working, you love it, and you see it go crazy. It’s like a little dopamine loop,” Haraldsson says.
The animation will remain on the screen until you press the center button, which will display session and weekly load utilization data in a simple graph.
Pressing this button again will switch to the Bluetooth screen, displaying connection status, and providing a reset function. 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 over Bluetooth for Claude Code’s voice mode and mode-switching shortcuts. The latter allows you to move between the default normal mode, “accept edits” mode, planning mode, and automatic mode.
Haraldsson said the device maintains usage limits because it reads the OAuth token in the Claude code to make API calls and gets the usage numbers directly from the response headers.
Clawdmeter is an open source project, so anyone can fork it and add their own features, animations, screens, and more based on their specific interests and needs.
Haralson said he was surprised to see that more than 800 people have starred it on GitHub since its launch on May 10, and 50 people have already forked the project for their own development. He speculates that the device appeals to them because it has a nostalgic feel to it.
“There’s a kind of nostalgia for when we had hardware devices for everything, like Walkmans and iPods to play music,” Haraldsson says. (Or, as one Redditor put it, Clawdmeter is like a “hardware Tamagotchi for context windows.”)
“I know this isn’t going to replace anything. You could put this into your computer, for example, but it’s just fun,” Haraldsson says.
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