Xiaomi's Open HachimoDock Is a 150 Yuan Desk Pet That Puts a Face on Your AI Agents

Xiaomi has open-sourced the design of a small desktop device that does something unusually honest for AI hardware: it shows you what your agents are doing. HachimoDock, incubated by the innovation product team under Xiaomi's technology committee, appeared at the West Bank International Tech Consumer Carnival on October 22 and again at the 2026 Guancha Conference in Hangzhou on October 24-25. The team says the hardware costs about 150 yuan, or roughly $21, to build at home, depending on the motherboard, screen, enclosure and how many units you order.

The device itself is modest: an ESP32-P4 microcontroller with 32MB of flash and 32MB of PSRAM drives a 2.8-inch, 480-by-640 display, with three physical buttons, a four-way joystick and a microphone for input. Keycaps and switches are replaceable. The default character is a small West Highland terrier, and users can upload photos of their own pets, generate characters with AI, or import local videos. What makes it interesting is not the silicon but the plumbing — HachimoDock acts as a face for AI agents running on your computer.

Say a request out loud and the device sends it to your desktop, where speech-to-text converts it and hands the text to agent sessions such as Codex or WorkBuddy to look things up, organize files or write code. The screen mirrors the agent's state — thinking, executing, waiting for confirmation — while the pet reacts with animations, text and sounds. Sensitive operations that need authorization still require confirmation in the corresponding desktop client. A USB connection syncs status and components with a management client for Windows x64 and Apple silicon Macs; the public package deliberately ships without any speech or generation API keys, so users configure their own services.

The team leans hard into vibe coding: describe a tool or mini-game in natural language, let an agent generate it, and the component syncs to the device in minutes. Prebuilt examples include a pomodoro timer, a drink reminder, a stock tracker and computer-status widgets, alongside games like Snake and a maze. Through Xiaomi's open-source Miloco smart home framework, HachimoDock also becomes a home console — voice-control lights, check camera feeds, monitor devices — after users authorize their Mijia account.

One caveat deserves the headline: HachimoDock is source-available, not open source in the OSI sense. The GitHub license permits personal, non-commercial replication, modification and component creation, while commercial use or product development requires written permission, and third-party components like Miloco keep their own licenses. The project nonetheless publishes full software source, a hardware bill of materials, structural part models and assembly guides.

The significance is less the gadget than the pattern. China's consumer AI companies are racing to give agents a physical, ambient presence — something that sits on a desk, glances up when your model is pondering, and asks for a tap before it deletes anything. At $21 in parts, Xiaomi has made that experiment cheap enough for anyone with a soldering iron and a coding agent to join.