I'd been saving the box for a month. Hadn't opened it. Avoided spoilers on Twitter. Haven't been this excited since I went to an Apple Store 20 years ago.
The OpenHome devkit showed up and we unboxed it live on X. Braden Mack from the OpenHome team joined the stream to walk us through the setup — white glove treatment for a dev kit. We got trained and fast-tracked to receive one of the early units.
No polished demo. No script. Just the box opened, the hardware connected, and the first conversation with an agent running on our own infrastructure, speaking through a speaker that sits on the desk instead of through a terminal window.
The OpenHome is an ambient device — a speaker and microphone that runs an AI agent in the room with you. No screen, no keyboard. You talk to it. It talks back. The agent lives on your server, not in someone else's cloud.
The device booted and connected to our Hermes agent running on the R420. Braden walked us through the developer setup so we can build our own abilities for the device — custom voice commands, custom responses, custom integrations with Nextcloud and the rest of our stack.
The full broadcast is below. It's an hour and 53 minutes. It's real. There are technical hiccups and moments of figuring things out live. That's what actually happens when you set up hardware on camera.
Watch the broadcast: Unboxing the OpenHome DevKit on X