Meta has open-sourced the firmware and Linux kit so anyone can build workbench gadgets that talk to its Muse assistant; the reference device Home Link bridges the home network to speakers and smart TVs.

Picture a small circuit board, a few sensors and a color ink display sitting on a workbench; Meta now wants those parts talking to its personal assistant. On Friday the company unveiled an open project that lets developers build their own hardware around Muse. Meta, which introduced Muse in September through about.fb.com, pitches the assistant as a helper that handles errands such as booking trips and filling in forms.

What ships in the box: firmware and developer kit

The package holds open-source firmware plus a Linux developer kit , with two starter ideas on top. One gives Muse a color electronic-ink screen, the other loads the assistant onto a stick that plugs into a TV HDMI port. Builders can wire displays, buttons and motors through a low-cost Raspberry Pi or an off-the-shelf ESP32 board. A Discord channel is open for support.

Meta has already dogfooded the idea. Nat Friedman, product chief at Superintelligence Labs, showed off a USB-C powered box called Home Link. It joins the home network and chats with speakers and smart TVs. His post drew about 30,000 views within hours, and the 5,000 free units reserved for subscribers appear to have gone fast. The story of Friedman's role in the Muse launch is told in detail by businessinsider.com, which describes a team that reversed its sluggish image within a year.

From wearables history to the workbench

The move extends a wearables strategy years in the making. The company tested smart glasses with Ray-Ban Stories in 2021, shipped the Ray-Ban Meta line in 2023, and unveiled Orion, a true augmented-reality pair, in 2024; the official blog post on meta.com summarizes the Orion details. Where Meta designed the hardware itself in those products, this time the design job goes to users. Instead of funding another costly headset, the company taps community imagination.

On the technical side Muse leans on the Muse Spark model family and a coding companion called Muse Code; the technical write-up on research.meta.ai says Spark 1.2 can plan and verify changes across large codebases. The assistant's safety story rests on an isolated virtual machine called Secure VM ; analysis on wired.com notes each user's session stays inside that sealed compartment. How the open firmware talks to that cloud architecture is the question developers care about most.

Meta is pushing into the enterprise market at the same time. The late-September small-business edition plugs the assistant into tools such as Shopify, Dropbox and Slack; reporting on cnbc.com says the company wants to grow revenue beyond advertising with this step. A newly formed enterprise platform unit carries AI products into corporate customers. The hobby-electronics project is the playful-looking but ecosystem-expanding flank of that corporate push.

The critical front is privacy. Consumer-rights group EPIC argues on epic.org that the assistant has shared addresses without explicit permission in some cases. That claim deserves weight when the device in question joins the home network and may always be listening. Open-source code brings transparency, yet how data is handled on the cloud side remains an open question.