Open hardware for the agent era

Nothing on your body should phone home.

Open-source wearables with no cloud behind them. The device is a sensor. Your phone is the brain. Your database is the only place your life is ever written down.

See the hardware ↓ Read the architecture

San Diego, CA Status Pre‑launch Firmware MIT Telemetry None

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The one decision

The wearable doesn’t run the AI.

It is a sensor and a Bluetooth bridge, deliberately. Your phone runs the model — local or API, whichever you trust. The results land in a database you own. That one choice is why the hardware stays cheap, small and long‑lived, and why nobody, us included, sits between you and what your body is saying.

01 dev‑wear devicesensors + mic · open firmware ours → yours

02 your phoneruns the agent · local or API yours

Past here, we cannot reach

03 your modelClaude · Ollama · whatever ships next yours

04 your databaseself‑hosted Supabase or plain Postgres yours

What we can see Nothing. There is no dev‑wear server anywhere in that diagram. We can’t log it, sell it, or leak it, because we never hold it — and no future board can vote to change an architecture that has no pipe to reroute.

DW‑002 Reference design locked

The one we can actually build.

A microphone, a radio and eight hours of battery, hung on a lanyard. It captures; your phone transcribes and thinks; your database remembers. The silicon is Nordic, the toolchain is Zephyr, and there is not one binary blob between you and the metal.

SoC	nRF5340 · Cortex‑M33 (no MMU, no Linux — and that’s correct)
Radio	BT 5.4 LE + nRF7002 Wi‑Fi 6
Microphones	2 × TDK T5838 PDM
Storage	4 Gbit NAND, on‑device buffer
Firmware	Zephyr RTOS · Linux Foundation
Licence	MIT — hardware and firmware

Where this actually is Omi’s consumer design is published under MIT — Altium source, gerbers, an 88‑line BOM with real part numbers, and a README that tells you to go manufacture it. So we are not hunting for a factory that will permit open firmware; we own a design and rent a line. First milestone is the local‑first software stack running on devkit hardware, then a small production run. Not the other way round.

DW‑001 Optics under evaluation

Your compositor. Your pixels.

A camera, a microphone array, and a monocular waveguide with the render loop handed to you. The glasses draw exactly what your phone tells them to draw — your layout, your typeface, your data. If you want a Fallout VATS readout of your inbox, nothing in the stack is going to argue.

Camera	8 MP · hard‑wired capture LED
Display	Monocular waveguide combiner
On‑board compute	None (deliberate)
Link	BT 5.3 → phone
Weight target	< 48 g
Prescription	Standard lens blanks

The honest part Almost every sub‑$100 “Android AI glasses” listing is a Bluetooth audio chip with a camera glued to it. Credible waveguide optics start near $130 in parts alone, before the SoC. So this line probably splits: a Lite that is honestly just a camera and good microphones, and a display tier that waits until the optics are worth what they cost.

DW‑003 Sourcing · bootloader is the gate

A wrist that answers to adb.

Full AOSP, unlocked at the factory, debugging on out of the box. Sideload the sample APK and every message that hits the watch is mirrored into your own table — where your agent can read it, draft a reply, and wait for you to approve it.

OS	AOSP 14, no vendor layer
Bootloader	Unlocked — at the factory
Debug	adb over USB‑C, enabled
Memory	2 GB / 32 GB
Display	1.43″ AMOLED
Rating	IP68

Where this actually is The blocker was never the hardware. Any number of factories will sell you an Android watch; almost none will ship one with fastboot flashing unlock left intact, because their firmware is somebody else’s reference build. This line waits until we have that in writing, from a factory that understands what it is agreeing to.

DW‑004 Sourcing · sensor API is the gate

Five years of you, in a table you own.

Heart rate, variability, blood oxygen, skin temperature — sampled continuously and written straight into your own database. No app in the middle deciding what you’re allowed to see. When a better model ships in 2031, you point it at five years of history that never left your house.

Sensors	HR · HRV · SpO₂ · skin temp
Data	Raw samples over BLE GATT
Export	Direct write to Postgres
Battery	~7 days
Material	Grade‑5 titanium
Subscription	None — there’s no server to subscribe to

The only question that matters Every consumer ring treats raw PPG as the product and the app as the moat. If a vendor won’t put raw samples on a characteristic we can read, there is no version of this we would ship — a ring that only talks to its own cloud is the exact thing we exist to replace.

What people actually asked us for

These aren’t features.
They’re your projects.

Hardware, a repo, and the agent you already have open. Weekend‑idea to running‑on‑your‑body in days.

DW‑001 · glasses

a heads‑up display like the Fallout VATS system, but with my to‑do list and incoming texts

The glasses render the HUD. Your phone pipes tasks and messages through the SDK. Reskin it however you like — it’s your draw call.

HUD overlayBT 5.3your layout

DW‑002 · pendant

something on my neck I can talk to my agent with, in real time

Pendant captures. Phone runs whisper.cpp and the model of your choosing. The reply comes back in under a second and every word lands in your Supabase, not anyone else’s.

whisper.cppany modelyour Supabase

DW‑003 · watch

an app that moves all my texts into a database so my agent can answer for me

Sideload the sample APK onto an unlocked AOSP watch. Messages mirror into your table; your agent drafts, you approve. The same APK runs on any unlocked phone.

AOSPunlockedyour table

DW‑004 · ring

a ring that keeps my health data private, so a smarter model can read five years of it later

Continuous biometrics into private storage. No subscription, no resale, no dashboard that disappears when the company gets acquired.

raw PPGprivate DBno subscription

The line

One stack.
Four bodies.

Same architecture in every one of them: capture on the body, compute on the phone, memory in your database. Different sensors, identical promise.

From box to running code

Buy. Clone.
Connect. Build.

Buy the device

It arrives with the bootloader unlocked, the firmware source published, and no account to create.

Clone its repo

Firmware, BLE pairing, sensor schema, the database migration, and a sample app that already works.

git clone dev-wear/dw-pendant

Point your agent at it

An MCP server ships in the repo, so Claude Code or Cursor can read the device API without you explaining it.

claude --mcp dev-wear

Build the thing you wanted

Describe it. The agent reads the API, writes the code, flashes the device. That loop is the entire product.

"put my inbox on the right lens"

Open source or nothing

If we vanish, nothing you own stops.

Firmware, SDK, pairing code, sensor schemas, the database migration and the MCP server are all public under MIT. That isn’t generosity, it’s the only credible version of the promise: a privacy claim you cannot read is just marketing.

~/dev-wear

Is any of this shipping today? +

No, and we’d rather say so here than in a footnote. The pendant has a locked reference design and a clear manufacturing path; the other three are still being sourced against hard technical gates listed on their sections above. What exists right now is the architecture, the sourcing work, and the software stack being built against devkit hardware.

Isn’t this just Omi? +

Fair question, and the answer is partly yes. Omi publishes genuinely open hardware under MIT and they deserve the credit for it — we’re building on their consumer design rather than pretending we invented a pendant. The gap we’re filling is software: their default path runs through hosted transcription and hosted models. dev‑wear is the local‑first stack — self‑hosted database, your own model, zero telemetry — and it runs on that hardware unmodified.

Why put a phone in the middle at all? +

Because on‑device inference costs battery, size and money, and locks you to whatever model was current when the device was moulded. A Cortex‑M33 that only captures and streams runs for days and stays cheap; the phone in your pocket already has the compute, and you can change your mind about which model runs on it every week.

Is there a subscription? +

No, and there structurally can’t be. You buy hardware once. Ongoing cost is your own API usage, or nothing at all if you run a local model. We don’t operate a service, so there’s nothing to meter.

Can I really flash my own firmware? +

On the pendant, literally to the metal: Nordic silicon on the open Zephyr toolchain, no signing key we hold, no blob in the path. On the sourced Android devices that promise is exactly as good as the factory agreement behind it — which is why fastboot flashing unlock is a gate we won’t ship without.

Founding batch

Be there for the first run.

No launch date we can’t defend. You’ll hear from us when the first pendants are real, and the note will include the BOM.

One message per milestone. No list, no partners, no resale.