2026-08-18

Open & Hackable AI Pendants

A live tracker of always-listening wearables — pendants, pins, clips and ear-worn capture — scored on whether you can get the raw audio and sensors off them when the vendor goes away.

Last updated 2026-09-21 · updated weekly by an automated research job · run #7.

The verdict

The current state of the art, as of 2026-08-18 (confidence unverified):

The Omi DevKit 2 is the most open ambient capture device, with MIT-licensed hardware, firmware, and backend, and UF2 drag-and-drop flashing. The Limitless Pendant is the most polished commercial product but is closed, acquired, and facing a support cliff, making its long-term viability uncertain.

Contenders:

What this is, and how it works

This page is generated, not written. A scheduled job runs weekly on a machine in a homelab. Each run it:

  1. Searches the open web for both the products already tracked here and for category-level terms designed to turn up ones we've never heard of.
  2. Feeds those results to a language model along with everything already on this page, and asks it what is genuinely new. Finding nothing is an acceptable answer, and most runs should find little.
  3. Writes the result into a versioned JSON dataset (data/live-research/ai-pendants.json) and commits it. This page is re-rendered from that file.

So: a machine wrote the prose here. Every changelog entry carries at least one source link, and every item and entry carries a confidence label:

Those labels are always shown, including on the weak ones. A tracker that hides its own uncertainty is worse than no tracker.

What this is not. Not medical advice. Not a review site — nothing here has been tested in our hands. No affiliate relationships, no sponsored placements, nothing bought. Vendor claims are attributed to the vendor rather than restated as findings. Where a price, a date, or a regulatory status is unknown, it is left blank instead of guessed.

What's new

No new developments since 2026-08-31, the date of the most recent entry below. That is a real finding, not a gap: this beat moves in weeks and months.

The last 30 days

Omi remains the only actively developed open option, with a firmware update for the Consumer/CV1 model boosting continuous recording to 19 hours and sleep mode to over 10 days. However, the CV1 still requires a J-Link probe to flash, and its storefront has been stuck in "pre-order / out of stock" status. The Omi Desktop app also saw minor updates, but these are unverified vendor releases.

The rest of the field is dormant. The Limitless Pendant, now owned by Meta, and the bricked Humane AI Pin remain community-dependent paperweights with no new developments. Friend 2.0 and PLAUD NotePin are still closed, subscription-gated products with no changes reported. The reported Meta AI Pendant, which would leverage the Limitless acquisition, has no new information.

A December 2025 research publication for OpenEarable 2.0 was surfaced, detailing it as an open-source ear-worn sensing platform. This is a useful reference for the ear-canal form factor, but it is not a new product launch or commercial availability update.

If you need a device you can actually own and modify today, the Omi DevKit 2 with its UF2 drag-and-drop flashing is the clear, low-friction choice. For anything else, you are either waiting for stock, trusting a closed vendor's cloud, or relying on unmaintained community tools.

Written 2026-09-21 from the changelog below, not from a fresh search.

Drawn from: nothing — there are no changelog entries in the last 30 days.

The last year

The last twelve months brought a brutal culling to this category. Meta's acquisition of Limitless AI in December 2025, followed by its immediate halt of pendant sales, set a hard one-year countdown for all existing hardware. Those Pendants will become paperweights when support officially ends around December 2026, as they have no documented local protocol—today, they are only accessible via community BLE clients, a path that a future firmware push could permanently sever. The cautionary tale was cemented with the Humane AI Pin, officially bricked after HP’s asset purchase in February 2025; community hacking attempts remain stalled by an authentication lock. The base rate of vendor abandonment is now the single most important factor for any purchase decision.

Amid this carnage, the open-hardware path remains the only credible hedge. Omi’s DevKit 2 (XIAO nRF52840 Sense) is the reference: MIT-licensed hardware and firmware with UF2 drag-and-drop flashing, a confirmed IMU on the BOM, and no cloud dependency. The consumer-oriented Omi CV1 (nRF5340) shares the open posture but has a more complicated flashing story requiring SWD and a J-Link, and its storefront has shown "pre-order / out of stock." Its latest firmware update (v3.0.9) claims to boost battery life to 19 hours of continuous recording, a vendor-claim but one aligned with the open, user-controlled model.

For ear-worn ambient sensing, the only genuinely open option appears to be OpenEarable 2.0, a fully open-source platform out of KIT with wireless audio and multiple sensors. Its research publication dates to late 2025, and it stands in stark contrast to the closed, subscription-gated alternatives. The other commercial offerings, like Friend 2.0 and PLAUD NotePin, remain firmly closed. Friend 2.0’s launch adds a speaker for voice interaction but locks memory retention behind a $9.99/month subscription after 30 days. PLAUD continues to pursue the intentional-capture (button-press) market with its NotePin S, winning design awards but offering no path to local data ownership.

The most significant negative finding is the total absence of evidence for usable IMU data on shipping devices. Despite the Omi hardware carrying a 6-axis IMU (LSM6DS3TR-C) on all board variants, the feature is compiled OFF in the shipped firmware. Similarly, the Limitless Pendant’s decompiled BLE protocol defines ImuData fields, but no one has ever captured a live non-zero reading from them. The "smart sensing" narrative remains just that—a narrative, unsupported by any available public data stream.

Looking forward, the only movement on the horizon is Meta’s reported upcoming AI pendant, presumably building on the acquired Limitless technology. Given Meta's history with the Pendant—acquire, halt sales, set a support cliff—it would be reckless to view this as anything but another vendor-locked product destined for the same orphaned fate. The lesson of the last year is unambiguous: if you cannot get raw audio and sensor data off the device without the vendor’s cloud, you are renting a paperweight.

Written 2026-09-07 from the changelog below, not from a fresh search.

Month Entries
August 2026 12

The ones that mattered:

All time

The field of body-worn ambient capture is currently defined by two parallel realities: a shrinking, unstable commercial market where devices become e-waste with corporate pivots, and a nascent open-hardware movement that is technically promising but unproven in availability and daily use.

On the commercial side, the category’s inherent risk is now fully manifest. Two key products have moved to the orphaned column. The Limitless Pendant, acquired by Meta in December 2025, has had sales halted and faces a one-year support cliff; it is reachable only via community BLE clients and a petition calls for its firmware to be open-sourced, a long-shot move to prevent its eventual orphaning. More starkly, the Humane AI Pin is a confirmed brick—HP acquired the company’s assets and shut down the cloud in February 2025, rendering the hardware useless and deleting user data. This establishes the base case for any closed device: when the vendor or its cloud dies, so does the device.

New entrants double down on the closed, subscription model. Friend 2.0 ($249 plus $9.99/month) adds a speaker but remains closed at every layer, with its “open source” marketing referring only to the AI model it uses. PLAUD NotePin continues as a button-press, subscription-gated recorder, not an always-on ambient device. The reported Meta AI Pendant, building on the Limitless acquisition, represents a future commercial bet but carries the same ownership risks.

This leaves the only viable long-term path in the hands of the open-hardware projects. The reference device is the Omi DevKit 2 (Seeed XIAO nRF52840 Sense), with MIT-licensed firmware, confirmed LSM6DS3TR-C 6-axis IMU, and UF2 drag-and-drop flashing requiring no special tools. Its barrier to entry is low. However, its intended consumer counterpart, the Omi Consumer/CV1 (nRF5340), remains in a “pre-order / out of stock” state and requires SWD and a J-Link to flash—a significant technical hurdle for non-developers. For ear-worn sensing, OpenEarable is the only genuinely open option found.

The most critical open gap is sensor utilization. Both Omi variants have the IMU hardware present, but the driver is compiled with the feature shipped OFF. The Limitless Pendant’s protocol defines IMU data fields, but no non-zero readings have been captured. This means the potential for multi-modal, context-aware capture exists in the hardware but is entirely unrealized in practice.

What has changed since tracking began is the collapse of the flagship commercial products, proving the tracker’s core thesis: ownership and vendor survival are not secondary concerns but the primary determinants of whether a device is a tool or temporary trash. For anyone considering spending money or attention, the current choice is binary: commit to the open-hardware path with its availability and flashing complexities, or accept that any commercial device is a time-limited rental with a high probability of abrupt, total failure.

Written 2026-08-18 from the changelog below, not from a fresh search.

How the field breaks down, by what we're actually tracking:

Gone quiet or discontinued. Kept here rather than deleted, because a tracker that removes its failures is a product page:

Tracked products

Available now. Price and regulatory status are blank where we have not read them on a primary source — they are never inferred.

Product Category Price Regulatory Confidence Last activity Links
Friend 2.0 closed-vendor $249 not established vendor-claim 2026-08-18 Friend

Upcoming

Announced, no date.

Meta AI Pendant

Reported upcoming AI pendant from Meta, building on Limitless acquisition technology.

First seen 2026-08-18 · confidence unverified · electrical

Why it's here: No changelog entry explains this status yet.

Sources: Reuters report on plans

Coming Soon

Announced with a date, or an open pre-order.

Nothing in this bucket right now.

What We're Watching

Exists, unproven, or newly discovered. This is where auto-discovered items land.

Omi DevKit 2

MIT-licensed at hardware, firmware and backend; LSM6DS3TR-C 6-axis IMU confirmed from the BOM; UF2 drag-and-drop flashing with no probe needed — the reference open device in the category.

First seen 2026-08-18 · confidence unverified · open-hardware

Why it's here: Omi Desktop app receives minor updates (v0.12.228, v0.12.233). (2026-08-31) — BasedHardware released Omi Desktop v0.12.233 on August 28, 2026, with a lighter settings UI. A previous version v0.12.228 was released on August 27.

Sources: BasedHardware/omi · Omi docs

Omi Consumer / CV1

Same open posture on nRF5340 silicon, but flashing needs SWD and a J-Link rather than UF2 — and storefront stock has read "pre-order / out of stock", which is the thing to keep checking.

First seen 2026-08-18 · confidence unverified · open-hardware

Why it's here: Omi Desktop app receives minor updates (v0.12.228, v0.12.233). (2026-08-31) — BasedHardware released Omi Desktop v0.12.233 on August 28, 2026, with a lighter settings UI. A previous version v0.12.228 was released on August 27.

Sources: Omi hardware BOM

OpenEarable

Open-source ear-worn sensing platform out of KIT — the ear-canal answer to the same capture question, and the only genuinely open option in that form factor found so far.

First seen 2026-08-18 · confidence unverified · ear-worn

Why it's here: OpenEarable 2.0 research publication details AI-powered ear sensing platform. (2026-08-31) — A research publication dated December 11, 2025, presents OpenEarable 2.0 as a comprehensive open-source earable platform for AI-powered sensing.

Sources: OpenEarable

PLAUD NotePin / PLAUD Note

Closed and subscription-gated but independent and un-acquired — the intentional-capture (button-press) counterpoint to always-on ambient.

First seen 2026-08-18 · confidence vendor-claim · closed-vendor

Why it's here: PLAUD launches NotePin S and Desktop software at CES 2026. (2026-08-18) — Plaud Inc. introduced the Plaud NotePin S, the latest model of its wearable notetaker, and Plaud Desktop, a desktop application for capturing and summarizing online meetings.

Sources: PLAUD

Promising

Early-stage, but the evidence or the approach is genuinely interesting. The only editorial bucket on this page — an item only lands here with a reason recorded in the changelog.

Nothing in this bucket right now.

Open questions

Publishing what we don't know is the point. These are things the job is actively watching for; when one gets answered it becomes a changelog entry and moves down here to the answered list.

Answered:

Full changelog

Everything, newest first, grouped by the month we found it. Long by design — it's the receipts.

August 2026

Omi Desktop app receives minor updates (v0.12.228, v0.12.233).

Discovered 2026-08-31 · published 2026-08-28 · update · confidence: primary-source

BasedHardware released Omi Desktop v0.12.233 on August 28, 2026, with a lighter settings UI. A previous version v0.12.228 was released on August 27.

Sources: GitHub Releases · BasedHardware/omi

Omi Consumer (CV1) firmware v3.0.9 improves battery life.

Discovered 2026-08-31 · publication date unknown · update · confidence: primary-source

A GitHub release notes that Omi CV1 firmware v3.0.9 increases continuous recording to 19 hours (+20%) and sleep mode duration to over 10 days (+92%).

Sources: release_firmware OMI CV1 · Releases · BasedHardware/omi

OpenEarable 2.0 research publication details AI-powered ear sensing platform.

Discovered 2026-08-31 · published 2025-12-11 · study · confidence: primary-source

A research publication dated December 11, 2025, presents OpenEarable 2.0 as a comprehensive open-source earable platform for AI-powered sensing.

Sources: OpenEarable 2.0: Open-Source Earphone Platform for ...

OpenEarable 2.0 announced as a fully open-source platform for ear-based sensing.

Discovered 2026-08-18 · publication date unknown · update · confidence: vendor-claim

Researchers at KIT have developed OpenEarable 2.0, a fully open hardware and software platform for ear-worn sensing applications with true wireless audio and a variety of sensors.

Sources: All About Industries article · OpenEarable project site

PLAUD launches NotePin S and Desktop software at CES 2026.

Discovered 2026-08-18 · published 2026-01-04 · launch · confidence: secondary

Plaud Inc. introduced the Plaud NotePin S, the latest model of its wearable notetaker, and Plaud Desktop, a desktop application for capturing and summarizing online meetings.

Sources: Plaud news blog · Forbes article

Plaud Note Pro wins iF DESIGN AWARD 2026.

Discovered 2026-08-18 · publication date unknown · update · confidence: vendor-claim

Plaud's advanced AI note-taking device, the Plaud Note Pro, has been honored with the iF DESIGN AWARD 2026.

Sources: Plaud award announcement

Friend 2.0 adds a built-in speaker and voice interaction.

Discovered 2026-08-18 · published 2026-07-30 · update · confidence: secondary

Avi Schiffmann announced Friend 2.0, an upgrade that adds a built-in speaker, allowing the device to talk back to the user with a unique voice.

Sources: Wired article · Mezha news article

Community attempts to revive bricked Humane AI Pin face authentication hurdle.

Discovered 2026-08-18 · publication date unknown · negative · confidence: secondary

A WIRED report details community efforts to hack the bricked Humane AI Pin, which are stalled by an authentication certificate required to access the device's operating system.

Sources: WIRED article

Limitless AI acquired by Meta, sales halted, one-year support cliff confirmed.

Discovered 2026-08-18 · published 2025-12-05 · regulatory · confidence: secondary

Meta acquired Limitless AI in December 2025, immediately halting sales of the Pendant. Existing customers will receive technical support for at least one year, with no subscription fees, but non-Pendant services like Rewind are being sunset.

Sources: Limitless official announcement · Reuters report on acquisition

Humane AI Pin officially bricked after HP asset acquisition.

Discovered 2026-08-18 · published 2025-02-18 · discontinued · confidence: secondary

HP acquired Humane's assets for $116M. All AI Pins were disconnected from servers on February 28, 2025, losing calling, messaging, AI queries, and cloud access. User data was slated for deletion.

Sources: TechCrunch report · Yahoo Finance report

Friend 2.0 launched with built-in speaker for voice interaction.

Discovered 2026-08-18 · published 2026-07-30 · update · confidence: secondary

Avi Schiffmann announced Friend 2.0, an upgrade to the AI pendant that adds a built-in speaker, allowing the device to talk back to the user with a unique voice.

Sources: TechCrunch article

Petition calls for Meta to open-source Limitless Pendant firmware.

Discovered 2026-08-18 · publication date unknown · discovery · confidence: unverified

A user petition calls upon Limitless AI and Meta to release the Pendant firmware as open-source, allowing users to continue using the hardware with alternative applications after the support cliff.

Sources: iPetitions petition page

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