Meta wants to sell you a Muse Charm this holiday season, a pocket-sized AI buddy with a squishy little face. The Verge AI’s Sean Hollister didn’t wait for it. He built his own for $50, and as The Verge AI reports, he did it with no coding experience at all. He described what he wanted and Claude Code wrote the software.
What stands out here is that Meta officially supports this kind of project. Below is his process, step by step, so you can copy it.
⚡ Quick Start
What you’ll learn: How to turn a cheap touchscreen devkit into a working Muse AI gadget, then add features by asking Claude Code for them in plain English.
What you need:
- A Waveshare ESP32-S3 1.75C (about $50, shipped from China)
- A PC with a USB connection
- Claude Code
- The Muse phone app and Meta’s open-source Muse Gadget code from GitHub
- Optional: a free ElevenLabs account for voice output
🛠️ The Build, Step by Step
- Buy the right hardware. Order the Waveshare ESP32-S3 1.75C, a push-to-talk devkit with a 1.75-inch touchscreen. It’s one of Meta’s first suggestions for building a “Muse Gadget,” a device that uses Meta’s open-source code and tokens to connect directly to the Muse AI cloud. Why it matters: picking officially supported hardware means the code is already written for your board.
- Plug in and point Claude at Meta’s GitHub. Connect the device to your PC and have Claude work from Meta’s repository. Then pair the device with the Muse phone app. Hollister said setup was “easy enough.” Why it matters: Claude handles flashing and setup, so you never have to touch a compiler yourself.
- Load Meta’s keys and check how Muse reads your input. At first, Muse treated his voice as audio clips to transcribe, not as commands. Once he fixed that, it worked, but slowly. Replies only showed a few words at a time, and there was no voice output. Why it matters: expect the stock build to feel bare. Hollister said it “really didn’t do anything useful” after the first install.
- Fix how replies are shown and heard. He told Claude he couldn’t read or hear Muse’s answers. Claude built a conversation history page you reach by swiping right. Then he added a British voice from ElevenLabs’s free tier so the device speaks its answers out loud.
- Turn it into a remote camera viewfinder. Meta’s sample app streams video from your phone camera but has no shutter button. Claude added three things: a button that makes your phone take a photo from across the room, with a high-quality live preview; a fix for the front camera showing upside down; and a low-quality preview over Bluetooth, so it works away from home Wi-Fi.
- Add avatars and a Tamagotchi minigame. He asked for a batch of avatars like the ones Meta showed at Meta Connect, plus a game where pets need food, play, sleep and baths. The first version felt too simple, so he asked for four levels of hunger, boredom and dirt. Treats make a crunchy mess and get pets dirtier. Too much play tires them out. Tip: build a basic version first, then add depth once you see what feels flat.
- Fix push-to-talk timing. He kept letting go of the button too early, so Muse choked on nearly empty audio. Claude fixed it in minutes by only sending clips longer than one second. Why it matters: small quality-of-life fixes like this are where vibe coding pays off.
- Go wild with extras. Claude built a working pocket watch face with three hands in about 15 minutes. It also found, trimmed and loaded video clips onto the device and installed a video player for them.
⚠️ Warnings Worth Taking Seriously
- You can’t judge the code. Hollister admits he has no idea if it’s any good. It “might be fatally flawed.”
- Isolate the device. He put it on guest Wi-Fi from day one, especially after reports that Muse leaked one reviewer’s home address.
- Don’t hand over sensitive access. He doesn’t trust Muse with his email or home network.
- Server lag is out of your hands. The remaining slowness comes from Meta’s servers, which are sometimes quick and sometimes not.
🚀 Where to Go Next
- Try other Muse Gadget boards Meta recommends and compare them
- Have Claude explain its code to you as it goes, so you start to learn what it’s doing
- Ask a developer friend to review anything that touches your network
- Try smart home control carefully, on an isolated network
Hollister’s main takeaway matters more than any single feature. Muse alone isn’t a reason to carry extra hardware, since your phone does the same job. The real value of a dedicated gadget is that you can program it to do whatever you want. Whether Meta’s retail Muse Charm will be this open is still unknown. Full details and photos are in the original story at The Verge AI.