Rubato

Rubato is a palm-sized retro-Mac screen that mirrors what your AI coding agents are doing — live, on hardware. It supports six hosts today: DeepSeek Harness, opencode, Cursor, OpenClaw, Codex, and Claude Code. And because long agent runs quietly turn people into furniture, it turns waiting time into gentle reminders: hydration, stretching, and eye rest.

Key features

Agent state, on hardware — a small host plugin publishes every model call over MQTT (TLS) to the device: Thinking, Generating, Done, Error. A breathing orb reflects the state with color coding: cream for thinking, glacier blue for generating, green when tasks are complete.

Customized breaks — six daily breaks counteract long sessions: hydration, bathroom breaks, eye rest, neck stretches, Kegels, and standing-desk reminders. Each has a daily quota, and breaks are spaced at least 30 minutes apart, presented softly and unobtrusively.

Desk assistant — desk clock with NTP time sync, weather via Open-Meteo with auto-location, and over-the-air firmware updates with automatic rollback, so a bad update never bricks it.

Web interface — adjust brightness, units and more from your browser; settings survive power loss.

Open source — firmware is GPL-3.0; the hardware layout builds on Misaka 2021's SmallDesktopDisplay scheme, with full credit. Build your own or buy assembled.

Hardware

ESP8266 at 160MHz, 4MB flash, 240x240 TFT (TFT_eSPI), USB Type-C power. Arduino framework, arduino-cli builds, dual OTA partitions + Safe Mode.

Honest requirements

• 2.4GHz WiFi
• USB-C power (no battery)
• A computer running your coding agents (that's where the plugin lives)
• English UI

Links

• Firmware: https://github.com/lovaxi/Rubato_Device
• Host plugins (six hosts): https://github.com/lovaxi/Rubato_Plugins
• Assembled units: https://www.tindie.com/products/beartificialintelligence/rubato-retro-mac-ai-desk-companion/