A $50 Waveshare Devkit Becomes a DIY Answer to Meta's Muse Charm

A writer at The Verge spent $50 on a small touchscreen pendant and used it to build a working AI companion, according to the publication. The device is the Waveshare ESP32-S3 1.75C, a 1.75-inch touchscreen computer that ships from China and looks much like Meta's Muse Charm.

The Verge reports that Meta itself points buyers toward the Waveshare board as one of its first suggestions for anyone building a so-called Muse Gadget. Such devices rely on Meta's open-source code and tokens to reach the company's Muse AI cloud directly. Meta is promoting its own Muse Charm for the holiday season, a squishy-faced helper meant to be carried around like a Tamagotchi.

The stock experience fell short, according to the article. Setup was simple: the writer connected the pendant to a PC, directed Claude at Meta's GitHub repository and paired the hardware with the Muse phone app. Even with Meta's keys loaded, Muse first treated incoming audio as clips to transcribe rather than spoken commands. Once that was corrected, replies stayed slow and silent, with only a few words appearing onscreen and no way to read a full message without opening the phone app.

Meta's build also included just one Jolly avatar that mostly sat still, and the gadget did not find smart home devices on its own the way Amazon Echo or Google Home hardware does. The writer says the device did nothing useful after the first install. Meta's sample software, which shows a Muse Gadget streaming video from a phone camera, also lacked a remote shutter button.

Several sessions with Claude Code closed most of those gaps, the article states. The writer had Claude add a conversation history page readable by swiping, and an ElevenLabs British voice that speaks responses aloud. A button now triggers the phone camera from across a room with a live preview, the front camera no longer appears upside down, and a low-quality preview works over Bluetooth without home Wi-Fi.

Claude also produced a batch of avatars in the style Meta showed at Meta Connect, plus a Tamagotchi-like minigame covering food, play, sleep and bathing. The writer later asked for four levels of hunger, boredom and dirt, and decided treats should leave a crunchy mess that makes avatars dirtier.