Image: Meta

Meta wants its Muse agent off your phone and onto your workbench. Nat Friedman, the former GitHub CEO who now heads product at Meta Superintelligence Labs, according to Engadget, has announced Muse Gadgets. It's open-source ESP32 firmware and a Linux SDK that let anyone build hardware that talks to Muse, Meta's personal AI agent. Chief AI Officer Alexandr Wang called it a "Muse ecosystem alert," and the code is on GitHub under the Apache 2.0 license.

Meta's project list gives a feel for what's possible: a round AMOLED desk buddy, a color e-ink screen for a morning briefing, a Raspberry Pi that works with Home Assistant, and even Home Assistant's own Voice Preview Edition speaker. An HDMI stick that puts Muse on your TV is marked "coming soon."

🚨 side project alert 🚨

Announcing Muse Gadgets, an open source ESP32 firmware and Linux sdk so that you can make hardware devices that work with Muse.

Grab an API token from https://t.co/g2yJeQRJH7 and point your favorite coding agent at the github repo to build your own… pic.twitter.com/wM1YsjsS7s

— Nat Friedman (@natfriedman) October 2, 2026

Meta also built one gadget itself. Muse Home Link is a small USB-C puck built on Espressif's ESP32-C5 chip. It joins your Wi-Fi so Muse can reach devices on your network, and community-written skills cover gear like Philips Hue, Sonos, Apple TV, Google Nest speakers and Samsung TVs. Friedman says Meta made 5,000 of them, free for Muse subscribers while supplies last. It's U.S.-only, one per subscriber, and it can't be reflashed. Claiming one just holds your place in line.

Muse Home Link (center) with some of the off-the-shelf boards Meta suggests building on. Image: Meta

Open code, but Meta holds the keys

So why does a cloud agent need a dongle? Muse doesn't live on your phone. It runs on its own dedicated computer in the cloud. That's good for security, but it means Muse can't see your living room on its own. Home Link is the bridge. In our view, it's Meta's way into the smart home without building a speaker. That's a market where Amazon's Alexa+ is now open to everyone in the U.S. and Canada, and Google's Gemini for Home is in early access in 20 countries.

The catch is in the fine print. The code is open, but every gadget needs a personal SDK token, and the token terms allow only non-commercial use on up to 50 devices, with no selling. Meta also calls the SDK "not a supported product" that "may change, stop working, or be withdrawn at any time." That matters, because gadgets tied to a cloud service live or die with it. Humane's AI Pin lost most of its features when the company shut it down in February 2025. Home Assistant's Voice PE, by contrast, was built to process voice locally if your home server is powerful enough.

There's a hardware race behind all this. Zuckerberg teased the pocket-sized Muse Charm at Connect and promised it "in time for the holidays in December." OpenAI's Jony Ive-designed device won't ship before the end of February 2027, according to a court filing. Gadgets get Muse into physical objects sooner, and as Engadget points out, what hobbyists build could shape Meta's own hardware.

Our take: this is a cheap, clever way to seed an ecosystem, and the "built by hackers, for hackers" tone feels genuine. But it leaves open questions. Will Meta vet community skills, which it warns against using for anything safety-critical, before they "may eventually" land in Muse itself? Does Muse's Sentinel safety agent, which approves what Muse sends to the internet, also check commands sent to devices on your home network? And will any of this reach people outside the U.S.? After Meta pointed Muse at small businesses, your home looks like the next front.