---
title: "LED desk display"
description: "A Raspberry Pi drives a 64×16 Bluetooth LED panel on my desk, with a control page, a busy light from my work calendar, and an MCP endpoint so Claude can write to it."
canonical_url: "https://stijnvanhulle.be/projects/led"
---

> Index of every page on this site: [llms.txt](https://stijnvanhulle.be/llms.txt)

## What it is

A desk display from an iPixel Color Bluetooth LED panel (64×16, such as the [Briloner LED message board](https://www.action.com/nl-be/p/3226274/briloner-led-berichtenbord/) from Action) and a Raspberry Pi. The Pi keeps one Bluetooth connection to the panel and serves an HTTP API, a control page with a live preview, and an MCP endpoint so Claude can write to the panel.

![The control page with a live preview of the panel showing Hello and a waving hand, the screen tabs, the brightness slider, and the text tab with emoji presets, colors, and effects](https://stijnvanhulle.be/images/projects/led/control-page.webp)

## Screens

The control page has six tabs. The panel draws text itself, the Pi draws the other screens, and the preview shows the same pixels.

- Text, with a color, an effect such as scroll or blink, and one-tap emoji presets.
- Stars: the GitHub star count of a repository you pick, checked every 10 minutes.
- Clock, in 12 or 24 hours, with or without a blinking colon.
- Weather for a place you search, from [Open-Meteo](https://open-meteo.com), redrawn every 10 minutes.
- Calendar: the next event from a private iCal link ("in 12m", "1h16m", a time later today, "tmrw", or "free"), then its title on a second page.
- Busy light: the panel glows green when you're free, orange shortly before a work meeting, and red during one.

![The panel preview showing a thumbs up and 1836, the star count of Kubb](https://stijnvanhulle.be/images/projects/led/stars.webp)

![The panel preview showing the clock at 15:58 in blue](https://stijnvanhulle.be/images/projects/led/clock.webp)

![The panel preview showing a calendar icon and in 9m, the time until the next meeting](https://stijnvanhulle.be/images/projects/led/calendar.webp)

![The panel preview showing a sun and 10°](https://stijnvanhulle.be/images/projects/led/weather.webp)

## Busy light

![The panel preview glowing orange because a work meeting starts soon](https://stijnvanhulle.be/images/projects/led/busy-light.webp)

- Mark each calendar as work or personal. Only work calendars drive the busy light.
- The panel switches to the busy light on its own before a work meeting and goes back to the previous screen when the meeting ends.
- Declined, cancelled, and free events don't count, and back-to-back meetings stay red until the last one ends.
- A switch turns it red for calls that aren't in the calendar.

## Settings

![The settings page with the GitHub repository, the weather location, the calendars, the busy light, night mode, and the text presets](https://stijnvanhulle.be/images/projects/led/settings.webp)

`/settings` holds the GitHub repository, the weather location, the calendars, the busy light, night mode (screen off and on at set times), and the text presets. They're saved on the Pi, outside the clone, and calendar links never leave it.

## Claude (MCP)

The control page's server has an MCP endpoint at `/mcp` with three tools: `show_text`, `show_stars`, and `panel_status`.

```bash
claude mcp add --transport http led http://<pi>/mcp
```

Then ask Claude to put a message on the panel when it finishes a task.

## Install

On a Raspberry Pi with Bluetooth:

```bash
git clone https://github.com/stijnvanhulle/led.git ~/led && ~/led/install.sh
```

The script installs Bluetooth, Python, and Node with pnpm, builds the control page, scans for the panel, and starts the services. After that, the Pi checks `main` every 5 minutes and deploys itself when `main` has new commits.

## How it works

- A Python service on port 8080 holds the Bluetooth connection, using [pypixelcolor](https://pypi.org/project/pypixelcolor/), and draws the screens with Pillow.
- The control page is a Nuxt 4 app with Nuxt UI. It passes its `/api/*` calls on to the Python service and serves the MCP endpoint.
- The panel accepts one Bluetooth connection at a time, so the service keeps it open instead of reconnecting for every command.

## Sitemap

See the full [sitemap](https://stijnvanhulle.be/sitemap.md) for all pages.