Agent Buddy: an ESP32 animated companion that shows your AI coding agents' live status
DanWahlin · x · 2026-11-09
Dan Wahlin built Agent Buddy, an animated companion that runs on a small ESP32 device, on your desktop, or both — it shows at a glance which of your AI coding agents are still working, waiting for input, or done.
The 16-minute blog post walks through the full build:
- Started from a photo of a Waveshare ESP32-S3 AMOLED device; had GitHub Copilot CLI identify the model and compare Arduino IDE vs ESP-IDF, landing on Arduino
- Went down an animation rabbit hole and built Character Lab to iterate on animations without constantly flashing the device — a huge dev speedup
- Added session tracking so it wouldn't celebrate too early when an agent wasn't actually done
- Shipped a desktop version sharing the same animation code for users without hardware
Built end-to-end with GitHub Copilot CLI and the Copilot app; the author uses it daily.
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