Launching today
iMessage Hermes on a Raspberry Pi
An always-on AI agent that lives in your home
52 followers
An always-on AI agent that lives in your home
52 followers
An always-on AI agent that lives on a cheap little Raspberry Pi in your home, with a real phone number you text over iMessage or SMS from anywhere. It runs Hermes, an open-source agent, and installs by handing the guide to a coding agent that works over SSH. Best of all, it's a foundation: build a family calendar on a kitchen screen, a recipe helper on the fridge, whatever you dream up. We build in public — join the Discord to see what others are making.
iMessage Hermes on a Raspberry Pi
The interesting constraint here is that iMessage doesn't really want to run anywhere except macOS. So a Pi in the corner of your house implies something else is doing the actual sending — a Mac acting as a bridge, or one of the reverse-engineered routes.
Which path did you take, and how stable has it been across iOS updates? That's the part I'd want to understand before hanging an always-on agent off it, since the failure mode isn't a crash you'd notice — it's messages quietly not going out while you assume they did.
iMessage Hermes on a Raspberry Pi
Hey @ark_y_k! Yeah, great question. We are using the Plow Chat API so you don't even need a Mac bridge. The Plow Chat API has been super stable and it also gives your agent its own phone number vs messaging yourself or something strange w/ BlueBubbles. We have a guide on how to use this API service as well -- https://howto.plow.co/plow-chat-api
ShellMate
This is cool. I have a Pi and I’m going to try setting this up — I’ll come back and say if it worked or not. Congrats on the launch. More tutorials like this would be great.
Very nice, how to test?