A Verge editor used Claude to turn a $50 ESP32 board into a homemade AI pendant

The Verge senior editor Sean Hollister, who has no coding experience, bought a $50 Waveshare ESP32-S3 devkit with a 1.75-inch touchscreen, one of the boards Meta suggests for building a Muse Gadget. He had Claude read Meta's code on GitHub to pair it with the Muse phone app, but the stock build did little. Over several Claude Code sessions he added a conversation history page, spoken replies with an ElevenLabs voice, a remote camera shutter and viewfinder, a working pocket-watch face, and a Tamagotchi-style pet game. He says he cannot vouch for the code, kept the device on guest Wi-Fi for privacy, and argues the real value of dedicated hardware is that you can program it.



