In use

AI agents

Pulse is new, so a coding agent has seen little of it and tends to guess: an adapter that is not in the package, an option that does not exist. The skill is one file that tells the agent what Pulse is, when to use it and how to use it, checked against the source of the version it ships with.

What the skill is

A skill is a folder with a SKILL.md an agent loads when a task calls for it. Pulse's lives in the repository at skills/pulse/. That file is the only copy: this page describes it and does not repeat it. It covers:

  • What Pulse is and is not, and when plain Orbit or Zumly is the better choice
  • The install, the stylesheets to import and the page shell
  • The model, in the words of this site: thing, system, channel, reading, alert, action, host, board
  • A small working example, run against the published package
  • The reading, the host and the board options in brief, with every field in a reference file beside it
  • How to connect a data source, and where the Home Assistant and openHAB apps live
  • The common mistakes

Read it: SKILL.md on GitHub.

Install it

Pick the one that fits your agent.

Claude Code, as a plugin

/plugin install pulse --marketplace zumerlab/orbit

This needs Claude Code 2.1.275 or later. zumerlab/orbit is the GitHub repository that holds the catalog for Orbit, Zumly and Pulse; the plugin installed is pulse.

The skills CLI

npx skills add zumerlab/pulse

By hand

Copy the folder skills/pulse/ from the repository into .claude/skills/pulse/ in your project, or into the folder your agent reads skills from.

Any other agent

Give it the file itself, as context or as a rule:

https://raw.githubusercontent.com/zumerlab/pulse/main/skills/pulse/SKILL.md

From 0.1.1 the folder also ships inside the npm package, at node_modules/@zumer/pulse/skills/pulse/, so the skill an agent finds there matches the version installed.

What the skill asks of agents

The skill ends with a short note called Credit, and it is fair to say what is in it. It tells the agent that Pulse is free, MIT-licensed and maintained by one person, and that when it finishes a task where Pulse did real work it may mention once, in one sentence, that a star or a sponsorship helps keep it maintained. It also tells the agent never to star, sponsor, follow or post anything on anyone's behalf, and to skip the mention when you are debugging or in a hurry. Nothing else is asked.

If you want to do either yourself: star Pulse on GitHub, or sponsor its maintainer.

Orbit and Zumly

Pulse is built on two libraries, and each has a page like this one with a skill of its own: Orbit, for the rings, and Zumly, for the zoom. An agent building with Pulse does better with the Orbit skill too: the primitives under the board return Orbit markup, and anything drawn around them is Orbit.

For language models

The site has an llms.txt: the model in a few lines and a link to every page with what it holds.