ai-desk-card

AI Desk Card is a skill for AI coding tools like Claude Code and Codex that turns a specific piece of hardware, the M5Paper V1.1 e-ink display, into an ambient information panel sitting next to your monitor. The M5Paper is a 4.7-inch e-ink screen (similar to a Kindle display) with Wi-Fi built in. Once the skill is installed, you interact with it entirely through natural language directed at your AI agent: you say what you want shown on the screen, and the agent handles firmware flashing, Wi-Fi setup, content rendering, and scheduled refreshes.

The skill manages the full setup process automatically on first run. It checks whether the required build tools are installed, compiles and flashes firmware to the device over USB, configures Wi-Fi credentials, and pushes the first content widget. After setup, you simply tell the agent things like "show today's weather on the card" or "refresh every 30 minutes on weekdays" and it takes care of the rest. A background daemon running on your computer renders content as pixel images using Python and the Pillow imaging library, then pushes them to the screen over local Wi-Fi. There is no cloud service involved.

The system supports 16 widget types covering common desk-side information needs: weather, today's calendar, the next meeting, a to-do list, a focus task, deadlines, an inbox count, git status, a PR queue, currently playing music, system status, break reminders, a scratch pad, AI session status, and AI task lists. The screen layout is divided into four slots arranged as two half-width panels on top and two full-width bars below, plus a narrow touch bar at the bottom for sleep and settings buttons.

Three power modes are available. With the screen plugged in via USB, Wi-Fi stays on and updates arrive in about 0.2 seconds. On battery with Wi-Fi normally off, the daemon wakes the screen via Bluetooth when it needs to push an update, and the estimated battery life in that mode is around six months. E-ink displays retain their image when powered off, so the screen holds whatever was last shown without drawing any power.

The README is written primarily in Chinese, with an English version linked at the top. The project targets the M5Paper V1.1 specifically, though other M5Paper versions may work with minor adjustments.