AI Assistant (Claude)

Voice-to-text assistant that uses Anthropic Claude (Haiku 4.5) for the reply and Groq Whisper for speech-to-text. Hold BOOT to speak; release to get an answer.

Sibling to AI Chat (free — groq) — same UI, same controls. The Claude variant uses a more capable model and can call device + web tools to give grounded answers (battery, time, weather, notes, web search) instead of guessing.

Cost. About $0.001 per question for plain Q&A. Tool round-trips roughly double the cost; web search is the expensive one — a single search call adds ~$0.01. Anthropic lets you cap monthly spend (see step 3 below).

Tools the assistant can call

• Device state — get time, battery, uptime, WiFi signal, orientation
• Device control — set brightness, play beep, restart, power off
• Weather — current conditions for LOCATION_1 (no API key needed)
• Notes — save / list notes on SD card (/notes/YYYY-MM-DD.txt)
• Web search — Anthropic-hosted; toggled with PWR on the splash

setup.txt keys

Mandatory

• SSID / PASSWORD — WiFi
• CLAUDE_KEY — Anthropic API key (starts with sk-ant-api…) — chat reply
• GROQ_KEY — Groq API key (free at groq.com) — speech-to-text only

Optional

• LANGUAGE — ISO-639-1 hint for Whisper (de, en, …). Omit for auto-detect.
• TIMEZONE — POSIX TZ string for the time tool (e.g. CET-1CEST,M3.5.0,M10.5.0/3). Defaults to UTC.
• LOCATION_1 — city name for the get_weather tool (geocoded on first use).
• CLAUDE_WEBSEARCH — 0/off/no/false disables web search by default. Anything else (incl. missing) leaves it on.

How to get a Claude API key (2 minutes)

1. Go to console.anthropic.com.
2. Sign in (or sign up — any email works).
3. Billing → Add payment method, then set a monthly spend cap of $5. More than enough for casual home use with Haiku.
4. Settings → API Keys → Create Key. Name it something like esp32-app-pixels so you can rotate it later. Copy the key — it starts with sk-ant-api….
5. Paste it into /setup/setup.txt on the SD card as:

   CLAUDE_KEY = sk-ant-api03-xxxxxxxx...
   

Note. A Claude Pro / Max subscription does not give you API access — they're billed separately. The API account is its own thing at the console URL above.

Controls

• BOOT (hold) — talk; release to send.
• BOOT (tap) — scroll long answers half a page; tap past the bottom returns to the top.
• PWR (short) — on the splash: toggle web search on/off. After the first reply: start a new conversation.

Editing setup.txt

The device reads /setup/setup.txt from the SD card on boot. Download a working sample — covers every app — and edit the keys you need.

Don't want to eject the card? Use the USB Stick app (mounts the SD card as a USB drive over USB-C) or the Filehub app (edit over WiFi).