Meta Open-Sources Muse Gadgets for DIY AI Hardware

Meta wants its Muse AI assistant to live on hardware you build yourself. On Friday the company introduced Muse Gadgets, an open-source project built around ESP32 firmware and a Linux software development kit that lets developers and hobbyists connect Muse to devices they assemble themselves. According to TechCrunch, the release is aimed at tinkerers and hackers: Meta provides the firmware and the SDK, and builders provide the hardware.

Muse, for those who have not tried it, is Meta's personal AI agent that books travel, fills out forms, and shops on a user's behalf, and it has drawn a large audience since launch. Muse Gadgets extends that assistant past the phone screen and into physical objects. The development setup is pitched as approachable for anyone with a parts drawer: grab an API token from gadgets.muse.ai, point a coding agent at the project's GitHub repository, and run the tools on off-the-shelf boards like an ESP32 or a Raspberry Pi.

From there, Meta says builders can attach Muse to displays, buttons, sensors, actuators, and whatever else they have lying on their workbench. The company published the code under the Apache 2.0 license and opened a Discord channel where builders can trade projects and get support. Its suggested starting points include a color e-ink display that shows reminders, an HDMI stick that brings Muse to a television, and a small touchscreen device in the style of the Muse Charm, the tamagotchi-like AI gadget Mark Zuckerberg showed off at Meta Connect.

Meta's own gadget connects Muse to the smart home

Meta is also dogfooding the Muse Gadgets project. The Muse Home Link is a USB-C-powered device the company built itself, and it lets Muse connect to a home network and talk to the smart devices on it, including speakers and smart TVs and anything else that exposes HTTPS. Nat Friedman, the head of product at Meta's Superintelligence Labs, announced the device in a post on X. He wrote that Meta manufactured 5,000 Home Link units and is offering them free to Muse subscribers while supplies last, with shipments expected in a few weeks.

Alexandr Wang shared the broader announcement on X as well, describing Muse Gadgets as an open-source ESP32 firmware and Linux SDK for anyone to make hardware that works with Muse. Friedman's post drew tens of thousands of views within hours of going up, which suggests the free batch went quickly. The announcement came the same week Engadget covered the release, and outlets noted that the free units are limited to subscribers in the United States. Some coverage of the launch flags the usual caveats for do-it-yourself smart-home hardware: hobbyist devices on a home network deserve caution, and this is not the category for safety-critical jobs.

The hardware kit fits a bigger campaign

Muse Gadgets lands inside a broader push to make Muse bigger than a standalone chatbot. Earlier in the week, Meta introduced Muse for Small Business, which is free with usage limits and connects to services including Shopify, Dropbox, and Slack, alongside a new Meta Enterprise Platform. The open-source hardware kit is the other end of that strategy: rather than waiting for gadget makers to adopt Muse, Meta is handing the tools to the hobbyists and small teams most likely to build something unexpected with them. Particle's coverage of the launch added that developers get example projects for displays, HDMI sticks, and smart-home integrations alongside the token and repo access.

By design, this is a niche launch. DIY firmware for ESP32 boards will not draw the crowds of a phone announcement, and Meta appears comfortable with that tradeoff. The bet is that a few thousand builders wiring Muse into displays, speakers, and homemade gadgets will extend the platform's reach further than another polished product launch would. Whether that bet pays off will show up in the Muse Gadgets Discord channel over the coming months, in the projects builders post and the ones they quietly abandon.