Claude Desktop Buddy - Bring Claude into the physical world with maker hardware
Claude Desktop Buddy exposes a lightweight BLE API from the Claude desktop app. It allows makers to connect Claude Cowork and Claude Code to physical microcontrollers (like the ESP32) to display states, handle permission prompts, and more.
Replies
Flowtica Scribe
Hi everyone!
This is a wayyy interesting bridge for Claude into physical form.
What @felixrieseberg shipped here is small, but the idea behind it is bigger: Claude Cowork and @Claude Code now expose a lightweight Bluetooth path that lets maker hardware react to sessions, recent messages, and approval prompts. The reference device is an ESP32 desk pet built on M5StickCPlus, which honestly feels like a very fitting choice — M5Stack really is one of the friendliest entry points in the hardware world🔥
It already makes interacting with Claude Code more fun to look at and touch:
But the interesting part is not just approvals. What happens when this lives on an e-ink kanban? Or when the hardware surface is something much more ambient, tactile, or playful? This is clearly the start of a much bigger hardware interaction layer for Claude!
@felixrieseberg @zaczuo Claude on a pwnagotchi... I'd like to see how that works out. 👀
Liminary
@felixrieseberg @zaczuo This is super exciting!! Can't wait to try this
UserGuiding
will you also bring back /buddy? @felixrieseberg
@mert_aktas we built this at the lab
to recreate the /buddy experience https://github.com/fiorastudio/buddy with some new features like XP leveling and making it portable via mcp. i'd imagine this will pair nicely with the physical manifestation of the tamagotchi now in these physical devices :)
DiffSense
Does it work on my GameBoy Color. thats all I want to know :D
Got it working on M5StickC Plus on Windows — but heads up:
the BLE connection is broken on Windows.
After pairing, device logs "auth ok" then immediately disconnects. No JSON ever received from the desktop side. Tested on macOS and it works perfectly.
Workaround: built a serial (USB) bridge instead — reads Claude Code logs and pushes state to the device over COM port. Works great right now, love to see Windows BLE fixed in a future update.
oh this is wild — BLE straight from the desktop app is such a fun primitive. any plans to open up the event stream beyond permission prompts? would love to drive a little status light off tool calls
Had a great time porting this to a pico free case models and guide to make a pico version https://github.com/amargandhi/claude-buddy-pico