claude-thing

A fork of Nocturne 4.0, the custom Car Thing firmware by usenocturne. Nothing Nocturne does is removed — this adds a second mode alongside it.

Turn a Spotify Car Thing into a desk monitor for Claude Code: every session at a glance, a queue of everything waiting on you, live usage bars, and permission approve/deny from the dial. Music mode and Claude mode live in one firmware image and swap at runtime, so the device stays a music player when you want one.

Car Thing kiosk ⇄ nocturned :5000 ⇄ [emulator bridge │ Bluetooth → Nocturne.app]
                                   ⇄ Mac daemon :8790 ⇄ Claude Code hooks
                                                        claude agents --json
                                                        transcripts, /usage

You don't need the hardware. The repo includes a Car Thing emulator that boots your real firmware image at the device's true 800×480 and drives it with the same events the physical buttons produce.

What's on the device

Mode switch: hold preset 1 + preset 4 for one second. Sticky across reboots.

Install

1. The Mac daemon — needs Node 18+ and Claude Code on your PATH.

git clone https://github.com/rithkott/claude-thing.git
cd claude-thing && ./mac/install.sh

Installs dependencies, builds the control page and device app, merges the Claude Code hooks into ~/.claude/settings.json (backup written first), and loads a LaunchAgent. Control page: http://127.0.0.1:8790. ./mac/uninstall.sh reverses all of it. --no-agent skips the LaunchAgent.

2. Nocturne-claude-*.dmg — Nocturne.app with the claude.* relay, which is what carries traffic between the device and the daemon. Drag it to Applications, then:

xattr -cr /Applications/Nocturne.app

It's ad-hoc signed rather than notarized, so macOS blocks it without that. An alternative is to open it without doing that, then go to System Settings -> Privacy and Security. Scroll to the bottom and click Open Anyway

Launch it and turn on Settings → Claude Mode → Claude Code relay.

3. nocturne_*_claude.zip — flash with Terbium in Chrome.

Hold preset 1 and preset 4 while plugging in USB-C to enter burn mode. Follow the instructions in Terbium. When it's time to select firmware, click local archive and drag in the zip file, and flash.

Car thing enters pairing mode automatically when first plugged in, connect from your Mac's Bluetooth menu.

The control page should show Nocturne connector relaying, and holding preset 1 + preset 4 on the device should bring up your sessions.

Repo layout

Tests

./scripts/test-all.sh          # unit tests + builds + firmware extraction
./scripts/test-all.sh --full   # also boots a daemon and runs the WS integration test

84 unit assertions cover the usage parser, session state machine, permission bridge including its timeout path, the queue's focus/typing fallbacks, and every device screen. The integration test drives a real permission round trip.

Two things worth knowing

Permissions are answered properly; questions are typed. A PermissionRequest hook is held open by the daemon, so allow/deny from the dial is the real decision. Multiple-choice questions can't work that way — no Claude Code hook can supply a tool result — so answering one focuses that session's terminal and types the option number. That needs Automation → System Events; if macOS denies it, the device focuses the window and tells you to press the key.

Nothing auto-denies. If the daemon is down or nobody answers within ten minutes, the hook is released with "ask" and the terminal prompt takes over — the device says so rather than letting the prompt vanish.

Status

Working on real hardware. A flashed Car Thing pairs, the Nocturne relay carries claude.* over Bluetooth, and live sessions from this Mac render on the device — the cross-compiled nocturned and the Swift relay have both now been exercised outside the emulator.

License

GPL-3.0 — see LICENSE, matching Nocturne upstream, which this forks. Nocturne and the Car Thing platform work belong to their respective authors; this repo only adds to them.