Nimbus
Nimbus is a small, battery-capable desk device you build yourself: a 45-LED light ring, a display (e-ink or color touchscreen), and a microphone + speaker on an ESP32-S3. It sits at the edge of your attention and uses light first, screen second, sound last - dark and silent until something actually needs you.
The parts cost about $60–75 (bill of materials), the firmware is in this repository, and everything runs on keys you bring - no cloud account, no subscription, nothing phones home.
Nimbus is source-available under noncommercial licenses: code under the
PolyForm Noncommercial License 1.0.0,
documentation and hardware under
CC BY-NC-SA 4.0. Build
one, modify it, share your fork - just not commercially. Details in the
repository's LICENSE, LICENSE-docs, and NOTICE.
One device, two modes - choose your path
The same hardware runs in one of two operating modes. Pick one at setup; switch any time (switching restarts the device).
Notifier - a status light for AI coding sessions
Your computer reports coding-session state over an encrypted, paired Bluetooth link, and the ring shows what every session is doing - running, waiting on you, done, errored - each state with its own color role and motion. Glanceable from across the room, no screen focus stolen.
Start here → Notifier quick start
Orchestrator - a self-hosted AI assistant
A standalone assistant powered by a hosted LLM provider (Mistral, OpenAI, Anthropic, or your own endpoint) with your own API key. Reach it over Telegram, voice (hold-to-talk on the device), or the browser chat. It keeps long-term memory on its SD card, runs tools mid-turn, spawns background research agents, and runs scheduled routines - and it updates itself over the air with signed releases.
Start here → What you need
Two display builds
A Nimbus is assembled in one of two display/input configurations. Both run the same firmware - a single setting, read once at boot, selects the drivers.
| Configuration | Display | Input |
|---|---|---|
| E-paper + knob (default) | 2.9" e-ink (SSD1680) | Rotary knob (EC11) |
| Touch TFT | 2.8" color touchscreen (ILI9341, 240×320) | Resistive touch (XPT2046) |
The touchscreen consumes the knob's pins, so a board is only ever one or the other. Everything else - ring, audio, SD card, battery - is common to both.
Where to go
- Build one - What you need → BOM → the build guides → Flash → Set up.
- Use one - Modes & signals explains every light and sound; the web UI reference walks every settings tab.
- Understand it - Architecture, then Turn anatomy (what the model actually sees) and Orchestrator World (the memory system).
- Fork it - the development guide and self-hosted OTA (shipping firmware to your own devices).
These pages are a published view of the firmware repo's docs/ tree. The
canonical source is the Markdown in the repository - see the
docs map.