Own your meeting notes. Not a subscription.
A fully open-source AI note-taker for about €30 in parts — instead of a monthly fee and a stranger's server.
Two buttons. Four gestures. Every screen.
This is the real state machine from the firmware. Click a button for a short press, hold it for a long press. Keyboard works too: tab to a button, Enter or Space.
On the real device both buttons sit on the right-hand side of the case — they are drawn under the screen here only so you can click them. Everything they do is the same.
Home. The four counters are the four states a recording can be in.
Watch QUEUE fall to zero and NOTES go up by one when the sync finishes.
How it works
Recordings write straight to the device, and syncing to your own server happens automatically over Wi-Fi. The transcription runs on that same hardware, so there’s no subscription — just the electricity to run it.
Once a recording is transcribed and cleaned up, it syncs back down to the e-paper screen. You can read your notes and to-dos right there — no need to open the web dashboard.
Starting a meeting recording always shows a reminder to ask the room for consent — there’s no way to skip it. You can also pause and resume mid-conversation without losing anything.
The e-paper screen draws nothing once it’s drawn, so sitting idle costs no battery. Leave it untouched and it sleeps; press the button and it’s back, instantly, ready to record.
From press to note
Five steps, start to finish — nothing to manage in between.
Press the button and speak. It saves straight to the device — no Wi-Fi needed.
Once you’re back on Wi-Fi, it uploads to your own server automatically.
Speech becomes text using an AI model running on your own hardware.
It’s cleaned up into a title, category, tags and action items — ready to use.
Open it in the dashboard, or read it right on the device.
Transcription always runs locally, on hardware you own — that part isn’t negotiable. Want AI-written summaries and extracted to-dos too? In case your PC does not have enough processing power (VRAM), you can optionally connect your own trusted cloud provider for that step. Only the transcribed text is ever sent, never the audio, and it stays off unless you turn it on.
Where the recording becomes a note.
A single-page app served by the same backend. Read, correct, search, tick off action items. Anything the AI wrote, you can rewrite.
The Library replaces separate Notes / Meetings tabs — one segmented filter, an unread dot per card, and tag chips you edit right there.
Own the whole stack
Fully open source — firmware, backend and dashboard, all yours to audit, fork and run forever. The hardware runs about €30 today, a fraction of a €200 professional meeting recorder, and there's no subscription after that: just the electricity for a small always-on machine.
PBKDF2-SHA256 at 600 000 iterations, signed HttpOnly session cookies, rate-limited sign-in, and a user_id filter on every query.
large-v3-turbo in int8 needs ~1.6 GB of RAM. No API key, no upload. The cloud engine exists, switched off.
./deploy/install.sh installs Docker if needed, generates secrets, builds, starts, and prints the admin login.
Your own domain with automatic HTTPS via Caddy and Let's Encrypt — or a Cloudflare Tunnel and nothing exposed at all.
What you need
It is a build-it-yourself project, about €30 in parts, plus some things you may actually already have at home.
Where to buy the parts
The links below are Amazon affiliate links, shown in full. A purchase made through one of them earns a commission from Amazon — the price stays exactly the same for you, and nothing on this page is sold by us. As Amazon Associates we earn from qualifying purchases. These are the parts actually used in the build; the links are a convenience, not a recommendation you have to follow.
| What to buy | What to watch out for | Where (advertising) |
|---|---|---|
| 01ESP32-S3 1.54" e-Paper development board | Try to buy it with the battery already included if you can. There is also a "touch screen" version — both work, but the firmware does not use touch interaction. | Adhttps://link.amazon/B06iI3qzh — advertising link, earns a commission |
| 02EEMB 3.7 V 320 mAh LiPo battery 402535, MOLEX 1.25 plug | You can go for a higher capacity, it just has to fit the case (W 26 mm × H 5.3 mm × L 38 mm). I bought a 500 mAh cell and could not close the case afterwards. | Adhttps://link.amazon/B04huBktZ — advertising link, earns a commission |
| 03USB-C to USB-C cable, 40 Gbps | Any USB-C cable that carries data will do. "Charging only" cables will not — the board is flashed over this cable. | Adhttps://link.amazon/B03a8yhVt — advertising link, earns a commission |
| 04microSDHC memory card | I had a 2 GB card at home which works fine, but with 16 GB you are on the safe side for a lot of recordings. | Adhttps://link.amazon/B04o8ojbB — advertising link, earns a commission |
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