what is claude-stick-buddy fr?

maxxtang/claude-stick-buddy — explained in plain English

Analysis updated 2026-05-18

★ 25CAudience · developerComplexity · 4/5LicenseSetup · hard

vibe map

mindmap
  root((claude stick buddy))
    What it does
      Shows permission prompts
      Physical approve deny buttons
      Animated mascot
    Features
      Shake to dismiss
      Encrypted BLE link
      Usage percentage display
    Tech stack
      ESP32-S3
      PlatformIO
      Bluetooth Low Energy
    Setup
      Flash firmware
      Pair with Claude Desktop
      Add custom character
    Limits
      Claude Desktop only
      Community bridge for CLI

mindmap root((claude stick buddy)) What it does Shows permission prompts Physical approve deny buttons Animated mascot Features Shake to dismiss Encrypted BLE link Usage percentage display Tech stack ESP32-S3 PlatformIO Bluetooth Low Energy Setup Flash firmware Pair with Claude Desktop Add custom character Limits Claude Desktop only Community bridge for CLI

what do people make with this?

VIBE 1

Build a physical approve or deny button for Claude Desktop's tool permission prompts

VIBE 2

See your real-time Claude usage percentages on a small hardware screen instead of checking the app

VIBE 3

Customize the device with your own pixel character animation and chime melody

VIBE 4

Extend the bridge to work with Claude Code CLI sessions using the companion cc-buddy-bridge project

what's the stack?

CPlatformIOESP32-S3Bluetooth Low EnergyM5Stack M5StickS3

how it stacks up fr

	maxxtang/claude-stick-buddy	division-36/z-jail	hoorayman/xiaozhi-pi-mochi
Stars	25	25	25
Language	C	C	C
Setup difficulty	hard	moderate	moderate
Complexity	4/5	3/5	4/5
Audience	developer	ops devops	developer

Figures from each repo's GitHub metadata at analysis time.

how do i run it?

Difficulty · hard time til it works · 1h+

Requires owning the M5StickS3 hardware, PlatformIO installed, and providing your own character GIF and melody before it feels complete.

You can use, modify, and share this freely, but if you distribute a modified version, you must release your changes under the same license and share the source code.

in plain english

claude-stick-buddy is firmware for a small physical gadget, an M5Stack M5StickS3 device, that pairs over Bluetooth with Claude Desktop's Hardware Buddy feature. When Claude Desktop needs permission to run a tool, this stick shows the request on its small screen with an animated pixel character, plays a chime, and lets the user approve or deny using its physical buttons, or dismiss it entirely by shaking the device. It is a fork of an earlier community project, with several additions: a fix for a crash that happened on reconnect, a full Traditional Chinese interface, a custom pixel mascot with several random idle animations, a screen that stays gently animated instead of going fully dark, and a way to show real Claude usage percentages, like how much of the current session or weekly limit has been used, by running a small companion script on the computer. The device connects using an encrypted Bluetooth Low Energy link with a six-digit pairing code, and reports back its battery level, uptime, and approval statistics to the Hardware Buddy panel in Claude Desktop. Building the firmware requires PlatformIO and a USB-C cable to flash the M5StickS3 hardware, the README also covers a quirk where the first flash sometimes needs the device manually put into download mode by holding specific buttons. The repository intentionally ships without a character animation or melody built in, so a user provides their own GIF and tune. A helper Python script resizes and converts a GIF into the format the firmware expects, and the melody is edited directly as a simple list of musical notes and pauses. By default, the bridge only works with prompts coming from Claude Desktop, not the separate Claude Code command-line tool. The README points to a separate community project, cc-buddy-bridge, for people who want the same physical approve or deny experience while using Claude Code in a terminal instead. The full communication protocol is documented in Anthropic's own hardware buddy reference repository, and this project implements most of it, though it does not implement one particular feature for pushing folders to the device. The code is licensed under GPL-3.0-or-later.

prompts (copy fr)

prompt 1

Walk me through flashing this firmware onto an M5Stack M5StickS3 using PlatformIO

prompt 2

Help me create my own custom character GIF for this Claude hardware buddy device

prompt 3

Explain how the Bluetooth pairing and encryption works between this device and Claude Desktop

prompt 4

Show me how to set up the usage_bridge.py script to display my Claude session usage on the device

Frequently asked questions