What is ai-desk-card?

AI Desk Card is a skill that turns a small e-ink screen into a physical desktop widget display controlled entirely by an AI coding assistant. You attach a M5Paper e-ink device to your computer, and instead of writing setup scripts or flashing firmware yourself, you just describe what you want in plain language and the AI agent walks through the whole setup on your behalf. Once installed, the skill can detect what state your setup is in, install any missing tools, compile and flash the device's firmware, start a background program called a daemon, configure Wi-Fi, and push the first widget to the screen automatically. After that, day to day use is just talking to the agent: asking it to show today's weather, your calendar, your task list, a pull request queue, or the current status of an AI coding session. There are sixteen widgets in total, including things like inbox counts, git status, now playing music, and a break reminder. The screen itself is divided into four regions plus a small touch sensitive bottom bar, and one full screen mode is available for showing a digital business card. The background daemon renders each widget as an image on the computer, then sends it to the device over the local network, which means no cloud service is involved at any point. The device supports three power modes, including a battery powered mode where it wakes briefly over Bluetooth roughly every 30 minutes to fetch an update and can last around six months between charges thanks to how e-ink screens retain their last image with no power draw. This project needs a specific piece of hardware, the M5Paper V1.1 e-ink device, along with a USB-C data cable for the initial firmware flash. It works with Claude Code as its primary tested platform, with partial support for several other AI coding tools that use a similar skill format.