Meta Muse Gadgets: Open Source Hardware SDK Guide 2026

Meta opened the muse-gadget-sdk repository on 2 October 2026. Three days later it had 1,318 stars, 245 forks and 26 contributors, and the Hacker News thread on gadgets.muse.ai had reached 250 points and 110 comments.

It is not a product launch. It is a pile of C and Python that lets a $12 dev board talk to Meta's AI agent. The repo's framing: "built by hackers, for hackers, just for fun. Side effects of tinkering may include bricked boards, voided warranties, brownouts, or bankruptcies." The SDK Terms are blunter — the Gadget SDK is "not a supported product and not a developer platform." Here's what it does, which boards work, what it costs, and the licence clause that decides whether your project has a future.

What are Meta Muse Gadgets?

Muse Gadgets are devices you build and pair to your own Muse account. Two SDKs ship in the repo:

• ESP32 Device SDK (esp32/) — ESP-IDF firmware you flash onto a microcontroller board. It joins your Wi-Fi, holds an encrypted session to Muse, and depending on the hardware shows an animated avatar, displays images Muse sends, and runs push-to-talk voice.
• Linux Device SDK (linux/) — a Python service for a Raspberry Pi or any Linux box with Bluetooth LE. Muse gets four commands there: system.run, file.read, file.write (64 KB at a time) and device.health.

The interesting primitive is the home-network tunnel. On boards with enough PSRAM the gadget becomes Muse's foothold inside your LAN, so Muse can reach "compatible devices you already own, or anything you build with a local HTTP API." That's how the agent ends up controlling a Hue bridge or a printer without Meta shipping an integration.

Those integrations are community-written Markdown in the same repo. The skills/ directory ships 43 skills — 42 device families plus one shared Google Cast skill — covering Philips Hue, Sonos, Apple TV, Samsung and LG TVs, Google Nest speakers, Brother and Epson printers, Roborock and iRobot vacuums, Zigbee2MQTT and ESPHome. The README is explicit that these "are not official integrations" and may "change or break", so don't wire one to anything safety-critical.

Traffic goes both ways: musegadget send-user-msg "The garage door has been open for an hour." pushes a message into Muse with no credentials, and --session-id puts it in its own side chat.

Which Muse is which?

"Muse" now covers six distinct things, and search results for "meta muse" mix all of them. This is the fastest way to work out which one you've found.

For the agent rather than the hardware, start with our complete guide to the Meta Muse app. For the Connect 2026 device announcements, see Muse Charm and Muse Realtime Avatar. For the models, Muse Spark 1.3 and Muse Glimmer.

What hardware do you need to build a Muse gadget?

The esp32/devices/ table lists 24 boards that already work, across four Espressif chips: ESP32-C5, ESP32-S3, ESP32-C6 and the classic ESP32. Each board is a short sdkconfig overlay, so adding an untested one means copying the closest file and changing the chip, button pin, status light and flash size.

PSRAM gates the home-network tunnel. The ideaspark, both ESP32-C6 boards and the Cardputer ADV lack room for it, so Muse can control those devices but can't reach the rest of your LAN through them. The Waveshare C6 and Cardputer ADV also can't hold their own voice session, so push-to-talk sends a voice note and the reply comes back as text.

Beyond the board you need a USB cable that carries data, a Mac or Linux machine to build from, the Muse app, and an SDK token from gadgets.muse.ai. Windows is not a supported build host.

Meta sells none of the hardware. Prices from the vendor pages the repo links to, checked 5 October 2026:

Cheapest path of all is $0: the repo ships a desktop simulator at esp32/simulator/ that compiles the production UI, state machine and avatar renderer into a 412×412 SDL window with no ESP-IDF and no board attached. It won't emulate audio, Bluetooth, the camera, memory pressure or power timing, but for UI work it's the sane starting point.

How do you build your first Muse gadget?

Two documented paths, both quoted from esp32/README.md.

Path 1 — let Muse Code do it. Install Meta's coding agent, point it at the repo, and ask in English:

curl -fsSL https://dev.meta.ai/install.sh | sh
git clone https://github.com/facebookincubator/muse-gadget-sdk
cd muse-gadget-sdk/esp32
muse --disable-sandbox

Then: "Build this firmware for my ESP32-C5 DevKitC-1 and flash it." The agent reads esp32/AGENTS.md, which carries toolchain setup, per-board build flags, flash commands and log reading. --disable-sandbox is needed because flashing requires the USB serial port. Any agent that reads AGENTS.md works — this isn't locked to Muse Code.

Path 2 — by hand. The firmware is pinned to ESP-IDF v6.0.1 exactly; the README says other versions aren't supported.

git clone -b v6.0.1 --recursive https://github.com/espressif/esp-idf.git ~/esp/esp-idf-v6
~/esp/esp-idf-v6/install.sh esp32c5,esp32s3,esp32c6,esp32
. ~/esp/esp-idf-v6/export.sh
idf.py menuconfig          # ESP32 Device SDK > Muse Gadgets SDK token
idf.py build
idf.py -p /dev/cu.usbmodem1101 flash monitor

That default build targets the ESP32-C5 DevKitC-1 and lands at build/muse-gadget.bin. Other boards go through tools/board.sh BOARD [build|flash|monitor] [PORT]. Pairing is a colour sequence on the status light — orange breathing means ready for setup, blue breathing means press the physical button to confirm, green means connected — and the board advertises as MuseGadget-XXXXXX once you enable Settings > Devices > Developer mode in the Muse app.

Read this before you pair anything: "Because these are community devices, pairing has no manufacturer verification and can't prevent an active man-in-the-middle attack. Set it up on a network you trust." Meta also "strongly recommend[s] enabling NVS encryption" via CONFIG_HOMEHUB_NVS_ENCRYPTION — without it, your Wi-Fi credentials and device tokens sit readable in flash for anyone with physical access.

The Linux path is one installer, and the README tells you to read it first:

curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/facebookincubator/muse-gadget-sdk/main/linux/install.sh -o install.sh
less install.sh     # read it first
bash install.sh --sdk-token mgst_…

It needs a Pi 3B+, 4, 5 or Zero 2 W (or any Linux box with Bluetooth LE), Raspberry Pi OS Bullseye or later, and a sudo account. Be deliberate about which account: "Muse gets the same access to the machine as the account you install it for. If it can use sudo, so can Muse." Pass --run-as someone to hand it a non-sudo account instead.

What is the licence, and can you sell a Muse gadget?

The code is Apache-2.0 — genuinely permissive, commercial use included. Three carve-outs: minimp3.h stays CC0-1.0, the Adafruit GFX font in main/pixel_font.c stays BSD-2-Clause, and the README states plainly that "the Apache License does not cover the Jollybot avatar". Meta's mascot art is not yours to ship.

The connection to Muse is governed separately, by the Gadget SDK Token Terms, and those are restrictive:

• Tokens are for "personal, non-commercial use with your own Muse account."
• You may embed a token in "no more than 50 devices that you make available to others," and "a Token may be linked to no more than 50 total devices."
• You "may not embed it in any device that you sell for any payment or other consideration, that you advertise, offer, or list publicly or through any marketplace or application store, or that you provide in connection with any promotion, incentive, or reward."
• You "may not represent in any way that the device is made by or endorsed by Meta."
• You may not touch anyone else's Muse account or data, and if you hand a gadget to someone else you must tell them what it does with their information before they pair it.
• Meta may suspend or withdraw access "at any time."

And the clause that closes the loop: "The source code license does not grant any right to Gadget SDK Tokens."

So the position is a split. You can fork the firmware commercially — Apache-2.0 says so, and nothing stops you shipping a product built on it that talks to your own backend. What you cannot do is sell a device that connects to Muse. Fifty units, given away, no money, no marketplace listing, no Meta branding.

What are Muse Charm and Muse Home Link?

Muse Home Link is the first-party gadget, and Meta has published a real spec sheet:

Its firmware "is based on the open source ESP32 Device SDK," which is why the repo is worth reading even if you only claim a Home Link. But "Muse Home Link itself only runs official firmware and can't be reflashed." It is the convenience option; a $12 Waveshare board is the hackable one.

Muse Charm goes the other direction: a consumer device, announced at Connect 2026, still mostly unannounced. Meta's own words are all there is — "a delightful and fun device built for you to talk and interact with your Muse. It brings the power of Muse with a state of the art real-time voice model into a device that fits in your pocket. We'll have more to share later this year."

There is no announced price, and press reporting on the form factor has contradicted itself, including on whether it has cameras. Our Muse Charm write-up separates the confirmed from the merely reported. The Charm is not in the gadget SDK repo and there's no sign it will be.

Do you need a Muse subscription to build a gadget?

You need a Muse account, not a paid plan — the terms only require you use the token "with your own Muse account," and no quota, rate limit or tier requirement appears anywhere in them or the READMEs.

Two real gates, though. Muse is US-only right now, so a gadget outside the US has nothing to pair to. And Muse Home Link requires an active subscription — the one place a paid plan is mandatory. Muse's tiers run free, $20/month and $100/month; those figures come from launch press rather than a Meta pricing page.

Is Muse Gadgets the same as Meta's Ray-Ban glasses?

No. The glasses are separate hardware on a separate roadmap, sold by Meta at retail. The only overlap is that Muse is arriving on them later.

• Meta VR Glasses — announced at Connect 2026, "will go on sale Spring 2027 for $1,299.99 USD."
• Meta Ray-Ban Display — announced 17 September 2025. Connect 2026 added cycling and transit navigation plus WhatsApp "Hologram" early access, and expanded sales to the UK and Canada, with France, Italy and Germany from 13 October 2026.
• Hearing enhancement — FDA-cleared software for mild to moderate hearing loss, "$149.99 (HSA/FSA eligible)" or included with a Meta One subscription, launching in the US later this year.

Nothing in the Muse Gadget SDK targets glasses.

What hasn't Meta documented yet?

It's a three-day-old repo and the gaps are real. What is genuinely absent on 5 October 2026:

• No releases or tags. Builds report version 999.0.0 unless you pass -DPROJECT_VER= yourself. There is no stable version to pin to.
• No spoken replies out of the box. Muse answers in text and screens show captions. For audio you wire your own text-to-speech API in at start_tts in muse_chat_session.cpp. Meta shows the hook and leaves the provider to you.
• No published token quotas or rate limits.
• Unused peripherals on most boards. The repo repeatedly says the IMU, IR, RTC, camera, SD card and Grove ports "aren't used yet". The only documented sensor integration is the SenseCAP Indicator's CO2, tVOC, temperature and humidity readings via sensors.read.
• No long-term commitment. The terms reserve the right for the SDK to "change, stop working, or be withdrawn at any time, with or without notice."

Should you build one?

If you want a desk device that shows what your agent is doing, buy a $40 Waveshare AMOLED board — the full-UI tier is where this SDK is actually pleasant, and the simulator lets you try the software first for nothing. If you want Muse in your smart home and don't care about tinkering, claim a Home Link and skip the repo. If you were planning to sell anything, stop at the SDK Terms: fifty free units is the ceiling, and no amount of Apache-2.0 changes that.

The signal worth watching is whether skills/ keeps growing. Forty-three community skills in three days is a lot of unpaid integration work, and it's the part of this Meta can't ship alone.

FAQ

What are Meta Muse Gadgets?

Do-it-yourself devices that connect to Meta's Muse AI agent. Meta published two open-source SDKs on 2 October 2026 — one for ESP32 microcontroller boards, one for Linux machines like the Raspberry Pi — so you flash or install the firmware and pair the result to your own Muse account.

Is the Muse Gadget SDK free?

Yes. The source is Apache-2.0 and the SDK token costs nothing. The code is as-is with no warranty, and the Gadget SDK Terms call it "not a supported product and not a developer platform". You still pay for the board.

What hardware do Muse Gadgets run on?

The ESP32 SDK lists 24 supported boards across the ESP32-C5, ESP32-S3, ESP32-C6 and classic ESP32 chips, from the $12 Waveshare ESP32-C6-LCD-1.47 to a $99 six-colour e-paper reTerminal E1002. The Linux SDK runs on a Raspberry Pi 3B+, 4, 5 or Zero 2 W, or any Linux machine with Bluetooth LE.

What is Muse Charm?

A pocket device Meta announced at Connect 2026 for talking to Muse through a real-time voice model. Meta has not announced a price and said only that it would "have more to share later this year". It's a separate consumer product, not part of the gadget SDK.

What is Muse Home Link?

Meta's own USB-C gadget: an ESP32-C5 at 240 MHz with 8 MB PSRAM, 8 MB flash, Wi-Fi 6, in a 35 × 42 × 10 mm body. It bridges Muse to your home network. Free with an active US Muse subscription, one per subscriber, shipping October 2026, and it cannot be reflashed.

Do I need a Muse subscription?

Not to build a gadget — you only need a Muse account, and the SDK Terms set no subscription requirement. You do need an active subscription to claim a Muse Home Link. Muse is US-only, which is the bigger practical restriction.

Is Muse Gadgets the same as Meta Ray-Ban glasses?

No. Muse Gadgets is an open-source hardware SDK for boards you buy and program yourself. Meta's glasses are separate retail products — Meta VR Glasses go on sale Spring 2027 at $1,299.99, and Meta Ray-Ban Display launched in September 2025.

Can I sell a device I build with the Muse Gadget SDK?

No. The Gadget SDK Token Terms permit "personal, non-commercial use" only, cap a token at 50 total devices, and bar embedding it in any device you sell, advertise, list in a marketplace, or give away as a promotion. The Apache-2.0 licence covers the code but "does not grant any right to Gadget SDK Tokens".

Sources

• facebookincubator/muse-gadget-sdk — root README, esp32/README.md, esp32/devices/README.md, esp32/simulator/README.md, linux/README.md, skills/CATALOG.md, LICENSE
• gadgets.muse.ai and Muse Home Link — specifications and availability
• Muse Gadget SDK Token Terms of Use
• Meta: The biggest news from Connect 2026 and Introducing Meta VR Glasses
• Vendor pricing: Waveshare ESP32-C6-LCD-1.47, Waveshare ESP32-S3-Touch-AMOLED-1.75C, Seeed reTerminal E1002