I Spent $50 Making a Budget Alternative to Meta's AI Pendant — At the Cost of Endless Lines of Code
Meta is set to sell its Muse Charm AI pendant this holiday season, but The Verge's Sean Hollister chose not to buy it. He built his own AI pendant that can chat, work as a pocket watch, and double as a camera viewfinder using a Waveshare ESP32 dev board and code written with Claude. Whether the $50 learning investment is worth it is up for debate, but he effectively smashed the long-standing entry barrier for building consumer AI hardware.
Meta is gearing up to release its AI charm product Muse Charm this holiday season. The device has a round, friendly AI avatar on its display, and is positioned as a pocketable Tamagotchi you can carry anywhere. Sean Hollister from The Verge had no plans to purchase one. His reasoning? He already had one at home.
His homemade build cost a total of $50. It doesn't come with a camera or 5G module, but it can hold conversations just like the official Muse, shows a cute virtual character on its screen, functions as a pocket watch to check the time, acts as a remote viewfinder for cameras, and can in theory also control smart home devices. In theory, that is. The only catch is you have to pour tons of custom vibe code into it to make all that work.
The hardware is a Waveshare ESP32 development board. Waveshare is a Shenzhen-based electronics component manufacturer, and the ESP32 is Espressif's microcontroller with built-in Wi-Fi and Bluetooth, which only costs tens of dollars. There are countless examples across the developer community of people pairing it with small screens for custom hobby projects. For the software part, Hollister got Claude to help write the code. He referenced the classic internet meme line: "we have Muse Charm at home", which jokes that the commercially sold product is overpriced, and you can make a passable makeshift version yourself at home.
This project is barely about saving money. $50 for a dev board plus a screen can never match Meta's mass-produced consumer electronics in terms of build quality, battery life and overall stability. What makes it truly interesting is that it lays bare how low the barrier to AI hardware actually is: a tiny interactive pendant that can chat, show expressions and come with a touchscreen only needs two core components: a microcontroller and a small display. Everything else is just code. You can have Claude write that code for you, but you still have to tweak and debug it on your own until it actually works properly.
Hollister says the whole learning process is worth the $50 he spent. He never claimed his DIY build can replace Meta's official finished product. The original article also mentions that his version lacks the camera and 5G cellular module that the Meta Muse Charm is rumored to include, so the two are very different in terms of what they can actually do when you take them out in public. The Verge's original story has a TikTok video embedded that shows exactly how this DIY device runs in real use.
If you have a dust-collecting unused ESP32 sitting around, this could be a fun weekend hobby project. If you don't, stop to think carefully first: do you actually want an AI pendant, or do you just want an excuse to write some code?
发布时间: 2026-11-01 00:05