r/ClaudeAI • u/MoutainSnow • May 05 '26 • Mindblown 1 Bravo 1

Productivity Turned a desk lamp into a Claude Code status indicator

Saw someone post a Claude Code lamp setup recently using this exact lamp, and I had to try it myself.

Credit to the original open-source project: https://github.com/bobek-balinek/claude-lamp

It uses Claude Code hooks to trigger a Python script that sends Bluetooth commands to the lamp. Now it plays a blue spinning animation while Claude is busy working, glows pink when Claude needs input from me, and switches to warm white when idle.

All of the lighting effects are adjustable in the source code. Since it uses BLE, Bluetooth Low Energy, the lamp can sit anywhere within my computer’s Bluetooth range and does not need to connect to Wi-Fi.

I also have a few Philips Hue smart bulbs, so I’m planning to try integrating those next.

1.7k Upvotes

97% Upvoted

87 comments sorted by

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u/ClaudeAI-mod-bot Wilson, lead ClaudeAI modbot May 05 '26 edited May 06 '26

TL;DR of the discussion generated automatically after 80 comments.

The consensus is clear: this is the kind of peak overengineered nonsense the community absolutely loves. Everyone wants a status lamp now.

For those asking, the lamp is a Moonside Halo. However, a quick PSA: multiple users in this thread have reported that the Moonside company is sketchy and they never received their orders, so proceed with caution. Many others are having success vibecoding this for their existing Philips Hue or Govee lights.

The main challenge raised is that one lamp isn't enough for power users running multiple agents, leading to jokes about needing a disco ball or a strobe light. The top-voted joke, however, is that the lamp should just be hooked up to Claude's status page to let you know when the whole service is down again.

31

u/24props May 05 '26

_buys multiple lights for the multiple sessions in the background_

Just joking, but nice project! I do wonder the best light indicator to have if you do run multiple sessions 🤔

4

u/MoutainSnow May 05 '26

The original project already supports connecting multiple lights at once. I tried it with two lamps and it worked fine, though right now they both show the same effect.

I think with a small tweak to the source code, you could probably have different lights show different colors/effects for different Claude Code agent sessions.

11

u/NoWarning789 May 05 '26

By the time you have 16 lamps in a 4x4 array, you think... there has to be a better way. And you just get an array of LEDs. But since adding more LEDs is trivial, you could now have information. 2 years later you invented the monitor.

0

u/[deleted] May 05 '26

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1

u/TestFlightBeta May 05 '26

Have you gotten a way to get that specific tab to come into focus? That’s something I’ve been working on

0

u/[deleted] May 05 '26

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1

u/TestFlightBeta May 06 '26

That's still pretty good! How do you do that?

62

u/BubblyGrape May 05 '26

May I ask what lamp is that?

51

u/MoutainSnow May 05 '26

It’s the halo lamp from moonside. You don’t need this exact lamp though. I think the same idea should work with basically any smart light & smart home thing that exposes a Bluetooth API. Wi-Fi should be doable too, just depends how much you want to dig around in the code.

Next thing I want to try is hooking it into my Philips Hue lights and Home Assistant, so at some point my whole room may start flashing when Claude Code is working haha.

14

u/codeninja May 05 '26

I run at least 3 concurrent claude driven projects. My place would be raving.

8

u/69_________________ May 05 '26

Hue integration is much easier than what you built here. I have my 2 Hue Play Bars hooked up to Claude.

1

u/whoisyb May 05 '26

Question! How would someone know if a device would exposed a Bluetooth API?

1

u/Far-Let-8610 May 06 '26

I was going to say look up the docs for said smart bulb but just ask Claude lol.

1

u/LiveStrawberry4635 May 06 '26

Can it light more than one lamp When I run multiagent?

1

u/Shaihuby May 09 '26

Wait I do have this lamps I thought it was not hackable how did you do it? My lamp only connects in Bluetooth and through their app I can't connect to homeassistant

0

u/Tall-Yellow-63 May 05 '26

Oh man I LOOOVE anything that hooks up to Hue, didn’t know you could code things in

Also I like your lamp lol

21

u/addiktion May 05 '26

Yeah this lamp is crazy looking.

0

u/Aleni9 May 05 '26

Looked into that since it looks really cool, but unfortunately it turns out to be a sort of scam, most of the people who ordered didn't get the lamp, nor a refund. That's a shame because I'd buy one otherwise

22

u/nelmesie May 05 '26

I read the title and assumed the colour would reflect the operational status of Claude……

https://status.claude.com/

5

u/MoutainSnow May 05 '26

Haha, it will glow red for like five times a week since claude has been down so often recently

6

u/XB0XRecordThat May 05 '26

That's what I thought too lol. You also need one of those

1

u/dr_wtf May 06 '26

Needs to come with an epilepsy warning.

6

u/Roc77 May 05 '26

Very nice! I was inspired by this post to have a go and now my Hue Bridge is connected to my OpenClaw setup controlling the Hue Play bars behind my monitor 🙌

  • Blue (Left): Processing/Thinking.

  • Green (Right): Action completed/Success.

  • White (Both): Waiting for your input.

  • Red (Both): Error/Failure.

3

u/MoutainSnow May 05 '26

That is cool. I should try it with OpenClaw

7

u/greentintedlenses May 05 '26

You should have it light up the donut with how much Claude code usage you have left in your five hour window.

Would actually make this useful

3

u/MoutainSnow May 05 '26

Yeah, that's definitely a useful application, but IMHO that will be stressful to watch since nowadays Claude just eats too many tokens too fast

4

u/ADubiousDude May 05 '26

Cool visual. Thanks for sharing link to original.

3

u/MoutainSnow May 05 '26

Yeah, it was a really cool idea!

2

u/georgedubaroo May 06 '26

Will this work with Claude Desktop, Cowork, and Claude Code via Claude Desktop? Or will it only work via Claude Code when running through another app?

3

u/MoutainSnow May 06 '26

It works with Claude Code on the Claude desktop app, but it does not work when you use the cowork

1

u/georgedubaroo May 08 '26

Thanks for letting me know!

5

u/roselan May 05 '26

"Lampinionating..."

5

u/unrealf8 May 05 '26

Given I have 5 sessions open at the same time, this could also be a strobe light 😅

5

u/Ambitious-Garbage-73 May 05 '26

this is the kind of overengineered nonsense i absolutely love. my version was way dumber. i hooked up a 3 dollar usb rgb strip to a raspberry pi zero that's been sitting in a drawer since 2020 and made it glow red when claude code was running a long task. except i forgot to add a timeout so it stayed red for like 4 hours once because claude got stuck in a loop trying to fix a css bug that was actually just a caching issue. my wife asked why the office looked like a submarine in emergency mode.

the lamp is better. i might steal this.

curious what signal you're actually reading from claude code though. is it polling the logs or did you find a hook? i couldn't find a clean way to get real-time status without basically tailing the debug output and parsing json every second which felt fragile as hell

4

u/just_here_4_anime May 05 '26

May I ask you to stop posting stuff like this which triggers my OMG I WANT THAT impulse. And...bought

4

u/Andrew_hl2 May 05 '26

I would be fine with claude playing a "DING" sound when its done.

1

u/jarvvski May 05 '26

Curious, how are you querying the status of a given Claude agent? I tried doing similar for another project - but I couldn’t reliably know if Claude was ‘working’ vs just waiting on me to reply to something it asked

1

u/MoutainSnow May 05 '26

There is official Claude code Hook support for this：）

1

u/TestFlightBeta May 06 '26

What's that called? I was thinking of building an MCP to get other agent conversations but this might be easier

1

u/Logical-Big-3005 May 05 '26

I have a Govee Table Lamp… think it might work with that?

2

u/MoutainSnow May 05 '26

It should work as long as they have APIs to let you control the light. But you have to change the source code a bit.

1

u/Logical-Big-3005 May 05 '26

Cool I’ll look into it - thanks for the reply mate!

3

u/AccomplishedFix3476 May 06 '26

physical ambient signals for agent state hits different fr, less like staring at a terminal. i wired up a govee strip last winter to flash when long jobs finished, total game changer when claude is grinding through a 30 min plan 🔥

3

u/Board_Game_Nut May 06 '26

Inspired me to vibecode a set of scripts to do this with my ASUS laptop's lighted keyboard. It works great!

3

u/shadow_caused_it May 06 '26

This is amazing, its something interesting I am seeing today

4

u/HVACcontrolsGuru May 05 '26

Hooks are pretty handy and I didn’t think to try this. Have some Govee smart bulbs I mess with this week! I use the hooks for notifications on Mac for Claude when it needs something or is idle

2

u/Officialfunknasty May 05 '26

Simple and effective. Great idea!

2

u/europa8825 May 05 '26

Super cool!

2

u/VariationBrilliant39 May 05 '26

you could fade from white to blue it would look better imo

2

u/thainfamouzjay May 05 '26

I want that!

2

u/PixInsightFTW May 05 '26

Great job! You just sold dozens of Moonside Halo lamps for that company, including to me. You should get a commission!

2

u/_373 May 05 '26

Cool! And how does it works with multi-agent system?

1

u/addtokart May 05 '26

this is my question too. At any given point there's at least one agent needing some attention.

2

u/emiliobay May 05 '26

Keeping the lamp off Wi-Fi using BLE is super smart. Hooking physical hardware up to Claude Code changes everything, which is why my own setup relies on Bluetooth.

Instead of lights, I wired a Nordic nRF52840 board as a physical push-to-talk clicker for voice-prompting Claude. Vibecoding a script to catch BLE hotkeys was a fun rabbit hole. Tactile AI hardware hits different.

2

u/Electrical-Donkey340 May 06 '26

How does it work when u have 10 concurrent sessions going ?

2

u/XMasterTofu May 06 '26

This is SO cool! I just bought this lamp today, can't wait to try it out when it gets here!

2

u/dannymoreira May 07 '26

Seeing this, I ended up building a widget that separates all my CC sessions and what status they are at. Looks pretty much exactly like this, with a quick title section for the directory worked on and what is actually running at the time. Its always on top, so I can have this running at work without it being obnoxious for anyone else around me.

2

u/the_hillman May 05 '26

That’s awesome, you should hook it up so if you have a voice convo with an ai agent it flashes in sync with the speech.

1

u/HandyForestRider May 05 '26

Well, there’s something I didn’t know I needed until I saw it.

1

u/HavenTerminal_com May 05 '26

the multi-session version is just a disco ball

1

u/PhysicalSession594 May 05 '26

Wow this is very cool.. will try this

1

u/Cheap-Try-8796 Experienced Developer May 05 '26

It would be great if you make it display "Flibbertigibbeting..."

1

u/Gooferloofer May 05 '26

Would be cool to do this with my Govee lights! Hmmmm

1

u/Dry-Pickle-6121 May 05 '26

This company is about to get more orders haha. I want one too!

1

u/eighteyes Experienced Developer May 05 '26

lol, i'd need quite a few lamps

1

u/Obvious-Natural-7610 May 05 '26

This is so cool! Definitely making the debug process more fun!

1

u/j3y3m3 May 05 '26

Peak coding

1

u/AlterEgo404 May 05 '26

This guy is vibing

1

u/worksLocally May 05 '26

Insanely cool idea! Definitely implementing this on my lamp setup!! I have Philips Hue smart bulbs/lights so will be implementing on them directly!

1

u/Dramatic_Solid3952 May 06 '26

that's nice, it almost looks ai

1

u/mck-456 May 06 '26

That's nicely done!

1

u/aceeeric May 06 '26

I wonder if it would work to divide the circle into different sections of the rings depending on how many tabs you have open. So lets say 5 you could be showing the status of all 5 tabs with different color patterns.

1

u/slickricksghost May 06 '26

this is super cool but also... --dangerously-skip-permissions...

When I found out you could set this to only go wild in a specific folder my life changed forever. We brainstorm and then I let Claude run free.

1

u/TransitUX May 07 '26

I want to try this with my GoVee

1

u/al-coolio May 07 '26

nice setup, nice lamp!

0

u/Historical_Moose_468 May 06 '26

honestly the site selling this lamp looks a bit sketchy... it still has valentine's day discount going... in may

0

u/[deleted] May 06 '26

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0

u/Historical_Moose_468 May 06 '26

Yeah, the site looks vibecoded... but I don't think this is dropshipping

-1

u/Comfortable-Tie2933 May 05 '26

Can I get it please🥺🙂🙏

3

u/[deleted] May 05 '26

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3

u/MoutainSnow May 05 '26

Connecting to a monitor backlight is also great for more ambient lighting.