Meta hasn't shipped its AI pendant yet, and someone already built one for $50

Meta plans to sell the Muse Charm this holiday season, a cute AI pendant with a squishy face, cameras and 5G that you carry around like a Tamagotchi. Tech journalist Sean Hollister didn't wait and built his own for $50.

The base is a Waveshare ESP32-S3 1.75C, a round 1.75-inch touchscreen in a pocket watch case, shipped from China. It's not a random hack: Meta itself lists this board as a way to build a "Muse Gadget", a device that runs the company's open-source code and connects straight to the Muse AI cloud.

Out of the box it was underwhelming. Replies were slow and silent, the screen showed only a few words at a time, there was a single avatar, and it couldn't find smart home devices on its own. So Hollister plugged the board into his PC and simply asked Claude Code to fix whatever bothered him.

Over a few sessions the AI added a conversation history screen, a British voice from ElevenLabs' free tier, a button that fires the phone camera from across the room with a live preview, and a Bluetooth preview so he doesn't need home Wi-Fi. Then came a batch of avatars and a Tamagotchi-style minigame where the pet needs food, play, sleep and baths, and treats leave crumbs that make it dirty. A pocket watch face with three hands that actually keeps time took Claude 15 minutes. It even found and loaded clips of Zuckerberg introducing the Muse Charm onto the pendant.

Hollister admits he can't code and has no idea whether any of it is good. He keeps the pendant on guest Wi-Fi, since Muse has already made headlines for leaking a reviewer's home address. The only noticeable lag now comes from Meta's own servers.

His takeaway: the reason to own dedicated hardware isn't Muse, which does no more than your phone, but the fact that you can reprogram it into whatever you want. Whether the real Muse Charm will be that open, we'll find out when it ships.

Bottom line: a non-coder built a cut-price version of Meta's upcoming gadget without writing a line himself. Claude did it for him.