deskpal

deskpal is a small touchscreen on the desk with an animated character living inside it. It naps, peeks in, knocks on the glass when it is bored, and reacts to the weather outside its little window. When Claude is working nearby it moves into an office and keeps you posted: busy, waiting on you, done, and how full Claude's context is getting. It also has a soft side, with meals to serve, a ball to throw, bedtime stories, an advent calendar and treasures to collect, and it can hop over to visit a second deskpal on another desk in the house.

Most of the character work happens in 3D first: a model is rigged, posed and rendered in Blender, then squeezed down into layered sprites small enough for the board, with faces drawn as separate pieces so it can blink, grin, sulk and talk. Then the fun part: writing hundreds of short lines so it always has something to say, from a sleepy mumble at midnight to a cheer when a long job finally finishes.

The Desk Link

The little character knows what Claude is doing thanks to a quiet Claude Code mod we call the Desk Link. It draws nothing on screen; it just notices when Claude is working, when it is waiting on you, when it is done and how full its context is, and passes that along so the character on the desk can react. Nothing is sent until a machine opts in, and a privacy mode lets a machine share how busy Claude is without sharing what it is working on. Over time the mod picked up two more jobs for the staff of agents: feeding their dashboard, and tidying up a long-running agent's memory when the agent asks for a fresh start, so it can write its own handoff notes, clear its context and pick up where it left off.

Highlights

• Hand-built firmware drawing a smooth animated scene at around 30 frames a second on a tiny microcontroller
• Characters rendered from 3D models into layered sprites with moods, blinks and lip-sync, plus voiced lines
• Shows live Claude Code status at a glance, with the work kept private
• Feeding, fetch, tickles, high fives, bedtime tuck-ins and visits between desks
• Weather, seasons and a day-night sky outside its window
• The Desk Link, a quiet Claude Code mod that feeds it, and that also helps the staff of agents reset their memory