Cloudmeter turns your Cloud Code usage statistics into a small desktop dashboard
The tokenmaxxing era of Silicon Valley now has its own hardware. A new open source project brings your Code Claude usage statistics to a small desktop dashboard, allowing AI power users to track their usage.
Sure, you can track Claude Code usage directly in the terminal using commands or other external tools and applications, but that’s not as exciting as seeing a pixel art version of Cloudd sprite dancing on the screen before displaying token usage information at a glance, right?
“Clawdmeter,” as the device is called, is a fun side project for AI power users and a timely indicator of how Anthropic’s Claude has completely entered the developer community and the growing interest in tokenmaxxing. This new “generative” trend sees application developers at various tech companies increasing the number of AI tokens used at work as a measure of how well they’ve embraced AI.
As one Reddit user joked when he first saw the project: “For now, Anthropic should just send us this for free.”
Someone suggested adding a button to increase the capacity or fill in more tokens using your card on file. (No, that would be dangerous!)
The idea for the project comes from Reykjavik, Iceland-based software developer Hermann Haraldsson, who says he’s always wanted to play with embedded devices, but never had the time.
“I’m not an embedded engineer or anything like that,” Haraldsson told TechCrunch over the phone. But Claude was able to get him on the job in just a few days, he said. “It’s a democratization of programming, so that anyone can now do what developers used to do. I think that’s really cool, actually.”
Most of the time he spent building the device was focused on design, making sure he got the font, colors, and micro-animations just right.
To build your 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 the device is turned on, the splash screen plays pixel-cloud animations that get busier as your usage level increases. You can also press the middle button to cycle through different animation types if you prefer.
“I love it when I work, and I find it crazy – it’s like a little dopamine loop,” Haraldsson notes.
The animation stays on the screen until you press the middle button, showing your session and weekly Claude usage data in simple charts.
You can press this button again to cycle to the Bluetooth screen, which shows the connection status and offers a reset feature. From there, you can tap the screen to return to the original splash screen animation.
Meanwhile, the other two side buttons send Space and Shift+Tab via Bluetooth to Claude Code voice mode and toggle mode shortcuts. The latter allows you to move between default Normal mode, “Accept Edit” mode, Edit mode, and Auto mode.
Haraldsson says the device complies with your usage restrictions because it reads your Claude Code OAuth token to make an API call, and pulls usage numbers from the response headers directly.
Because Cloudmeter is an open source project, anyone can fork it to add their own features, animations, screenshots, and more, based on their specific interests and needs.
Haraldsson says he was surprised to see that more than 800 people have starred on GitHub since it was launched on May 10, and 50 have already created the project for their own development. He suspects that this device appeals to them because it has an unpleasant feel.
“There’s a kind of desire where you used to have a hardware device for everything – like a Walkman to play music, or an iPod,” says Haraldsson. (Or, as one Redditor put it, the Cloudmeter is like a “hardware Tamagotchi for my virtual reality window.”)
“I know it doesn’t change anything – like, you can have this on your computer – but it’s fun,” Haraldsson said.
If you shop through links in our articles, we may earn a small commission. This does not affect our editorial independence.
