AgentMeter

The itch

I kept discovering I had run out of a usage window at the worst possible moment, halfway through something. The information existed, but it lived in menus I had to go looking for. I wanted it the way a clock gives you the time: glanceable, always there, not something you open.

What it is

AgentMeter is a 480×480 AMOLED touchscreen driven by an ESP32-S3, paired with a small bridge on the Mac. The display shows up to eight providers at once: session and weekly windows, a progress ring for each, and a live countdown to the next reset that the device keeps ticking on its own between updates. Tap a provider for detail. There is a physical button for when touch is inconvenient.

The design rule: credentials stay on the computer

This was the decision everything else follows from. The display is a dumb, trustworthy terminal.

The Mac bridge collects the numbers, strips identity and billing fields, and sends a document capped at 4,096 bytes over encrypted Bluetooth LE, with USB serial as a fallback. The firmware acknowledges a message only after validating it. No account, token, prompt or file path ever reaches the device, so losing it costs you a gadget and nothing else.

Details that made it feel finished

• Honest states. Waiting, live, reconnecting, stale and error each look different. Old data is shown as old, and an unknown value reads “Not reported” rather than pretending to be zero.
• Kind to the panel. Brightness, dimming, screen-off and AMOLED pixel shifting are all configurable.
• A native companion. A menu-bar app handles connection, settings and live telemetry, in light and dark themes, plus desktop widgets that draw from the same local snapshot.
• Standalone mode. The desktop app keeps working with device sync switched off entirely.

Where it stands

The first hardware version works end to end: Bluetooth delivery, acknowledgement, reconnection, USB fallback, alerts and launch-at-login are all in. Mochi, my animation SDK, targets the same class of small AMOLED screen.