AI Context Window on LED Matrix

Framework Laptop 16
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This is dumb but awesome. I forked framework’s inputmodule code and completely refactored the rust matrix module into a system service architecture with a new 'FWInputModuleD" service that multiplexes multiple shared space across all modules installed that are addressable by userland apps. It is a system daemon and speaks to apps over DBUS.

Then I forked OpenCode and added hooks to report how many tokens I have left in my context window on the LED matrix. Even activity monitors for when the AI agents are thinking or compacting the conversation. I wanted to do this as a Claude Code plugin, but the plugin API doesn’t expose the context window information, and I couldn’t hack it. I might vibe code some patches for Codex and Gemini CLI, though, since they are open source.

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Need a few days to open source this.

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Hello Zac,

I like your idea, have you seen this project: GitHub - MidnightJava/led-matrix: System Monitor display for Framework 16 LED Matrix input module

In theory, you make it a plugin and contribute it to the project?

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I don’t do AI dev in my free time anymore, but this is pretty cool! I’d definitely be checking it out if I was (and had the module).

Seems similar to my use of the RGB keyboard for showing processors temps/utilization.
RGB Keyboard Custom Firmware - PC Utilization Stats - Framework Laptop 16 - Framework Community

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Oh, that’s a really neat project. I didn’t know that existed. But yeah, actually this could work more in reverse. There are two parts to what I built. A daemon to allow multiple front ends to share the real estate on the matrix and a front end hack for my AI context window. This system daemon I created could be a different backend for this. My system daemon lets you create addressable areas so multiple separate apps driving parts of the screen without owning the whole matrix. I even as pagination mode and dbus command to switch pages and I have hot keys to switch to between pages.

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I’m interested in this part. Currently the monitoring app takes the matrix and divides it in 4 quadrants, the default is displaying any of x choices of system metrics to display, plugins would allow to display something else on one or any quadrant(s). That’s why I mentioned plugins, as it would allow to have that token metric to displayed.

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Yeah! Totally. Right now, I’m using dbus because it made the most sense, especially for security in userland apps to communicate with a system app that has direct dev access, but I’m debating whether I want to create a loopback dev device of sorts so that existing code that already knows how to communicate can just switch to the dev device they write to. dbus has a little overhead for writing updates being a packet protocol with a bit of parsing overhead.

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