SidePulse turns your MacBook's SD card slot into an 8-LED agent status light you control by writing a file
yacineMTB · x · 2026-11-07
SidePulse Pro: a status line that lives in your SD card slot
SidePulse Pro is an accessory with 8 flush RGB LEDs that sits in the SD card slot of a 14″/16″ MacBook Pro, showing coding agent status at a glance — working, needs input, or done. It even works with the lid closed, and people have wired it into Codex CAD runs and Claude Code setups (green = running, bright = done, orange = needs input).
The core trick: the device exposes itself as a filesystem, so no driver, app, or SDK is needed. Changing the lights is just writing a text file:
bash
echo "#30d158 800ms pulse" > /Volumes/SidePulse/LEDS.LED
LEDS.LED uses a small CSS-inspired animation language covering colors, timing, easing, brightness, per-LED addressing, and loops. Anything that can write a file — shell scripts, coding agents, CI hooks, cron jobs — can control it out of the box. A cheaper Dot model is also available.
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