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claude-dot-display turns a 64x64 iDotMatrix LED panel into an ambient status board for your Claude Code sessions. Each running session gets a row: its name in a colour that tells you its state, and how many stages it has left.

• blue — running
• amber — waiting on a question
• red — hit an issue
• green — done

When nothing is running, the panel switches to a summary of your token usage.

Underneath it is an original, MIT-licensed implementation of the iDotMatrix BLE protocol, usable on its own.

No panel? It still works

dotdisplay board shows the same board in your terminal, and dotdisplay statusline puts a one-line summary wherever you want one. Neither needs Bluetooth, an address, or the daemon.

claude-dot-display            38% · reset 22:10
───────────────────────────────────────────────
● a-very-long-session waiting on you          3
● hwmon-d7            issue                   7
● kolonial            done                    0
● storygen            running                12

The terminal view is not a mirror of the panel. Nine-character names, the 8px font and the four-row budget are consequences of a 64x64 LED matrix; a terminal has none of them, so it shows full names and spells the states out.

To put the summary in Claude Code's status line, add to your settings.json:

{
  "statusLine": { "type": "command", "command": "dotdisplay statusline" }
}

It shows names for the sessions that need you and counts for the rest:

!hwmon-d7 ?storygen *3

! issue · ? waiting on you · * running · + done. Knowing which session is blocked is actionable; knowing which one is merely running is not, so those stay a number. If names would push the line past 60 characters it falls back to counts entirely — a prompt segment that wraps is worse than one that is vague. --counts-only forces that shorter form.

It prints nothing when no session is running, so it costs you no space when there is nothing to say. The installer will not edit settings.json for you — you may already have a status line, and replacing it is not ours to do. If you already run one for its side effects, wrap it rather than replace it: mine writes the rate-limit file this board's header reads.

The LED matrix is the fun part, not the price of entry.

Status

Alpha, and honest about it. The repository is being built in phases:

Phase	What	State
P0	Repo foundation	done
P1	BLE driver	done — verified against hardware
P2	Board, renderer, daemon	done — running as a service
P3	Claude Code plugin	done — sessions report themselves
P4	Shell toolkit	done
P5	Agent integration guide	done
P6	Works without a panel	done

Install the plugin today and it does nothing yet — it carries no hooks or skills until P3. It exists so the install path is real and testable.

Written with Claude Code. Essentially all of the code, the protocol document and these docs were produced by an AI pair, directed and reviewed by a human, with every hardware claim verified by photographing the panel. That is worth knowing before you read the code, and worth saying plainly rather than leaving you to infer it from the name.

PROTOCOL.md is already worth reading if you own one of these panels. Everything in it is marked with whether it has been replayed against real hardware yet — at this stage, none of it has.

Why we wrote our own protocol layer

Every Python library for these panels is GPL-3.0:

Project	Licence
derkalle4/python3-idotmatrix-client	GPL-3.0
markusressel/idotmatrix-api-client	GPL-3.0
python3-idotmatrix-library (upstream of both)	GPL-3.0

Those projects did the original work of making these panels usable at all, and this one would not exist without the path they cut. But their licence is viral: anything that links them inherits it. A project cannot honestly call itself MIT while requiring a GPL-3.0 library at runtime.

We wanted this to be really free — usable in commercial work, in proprietary tools, in anything at all, with no obligations flowing back. So we wrote the protocol layer ourselves.

Clean-room, and we mean it. No GPL source was read. The protocol was derived from bytes observed on the wire against real hardware — the vendor's own phone application talking to the panel, captured over Bluetooth HCI and decoded. Protocol facts are not copyrightable, but provenance is what makes that defensible, so PROTOCOL.md records for every command where it was captured and whether it has been replayed.

It turned out faster, too

Going to the wire directly answered a question the existing libraries had not: how the vendor app uploads a full frame so quickly. It sends the panel raw RGB888 in three chunks. This driver does the same in a measured 0.77 seconds — the per-pixel approach the GPL libraries use takes roughly 6 seconds for the same frame.

The pixel ordering — row-major, origin top-left — was established by uploading three images that differ from a black baseline by exactly one pixel, at three known corners, and finding that pixel in each payload. Measured, not inferred.

If you only want a permissively licensed way to talk to one of these panels, take dotdisplay.ble and ignore the rest.

Requirements

• Python 3.11 or newer
• A Bluetooth LE adapter within range of the panel
• A 64x64 iDotMatrix panel

No pairing is needed — the panel accepts connections unpaired. What you do need is its Bluetooth address:

dotdisplay discover          # lists panels in range as IDM-<six hex digits>
dotdisplay check             # shows a code on the panel to confirm it

check matters when more than one panel is around: reachability only proves that something answered, while seeing the code proves the address points at the panel you are looking at.

Other iDotMatrix sizes are untested. We only claim what we have verified against hardware.

Install

pipx install claude-dot-display

Not yet published — see Status.

Shell usage

Every command works whether or not the board daemon is running. If it is, the command is queued and the daemon executes it; if not, the CLI connects directly. A script does not have to know which.

dotdisplay text "BUILD OK" --colour 00ff00
dotdisplay fill 0000ff
dotdisplay pixel 0 0 ff0000
dotdisplay brightness 40
dotdisplay power off
dotdisplay clear

Add --json for one machine-readable object per command; the exit code is 0 only when its status is done.

if make test; then dotdisplay fill 00ff00; else dotdisplay text "KAPUTT" --colour ff0000; fi

Text is rasterised on this side and sent as an image: the panel has no font of its own (see PROTOCOL.md). The size is chosen so the text fills as much of the panel as it can.

For agents and LLMs

AGENTS.md is the integration contract: the commands, the --json output shape, and — more usefully — the constraints that are invisible from outside, such as the single radio owner and the fact that nothing can read back what the panel is showing.

Licence

MIT — see LICENSE.