--- title: "Buy it or build it: the five forms of KyberDeck" url: "https://kyberdeck.com/blog/five-forms-of-kyberdeck" description: "A card, a band, a pocket deck, a home node and a robot module: why one assistant needs five bodies, what each one is for, and which ones you can build yourself." --- # Buy it or build it: the five forms of KyberDeck October 8, 2026·4 min read·Editorial team Five devices of one line stacked into a small tower: a robot module, a home hub cube, a closed pocket deck, a wrist unit and a card on top It is a Tuesday, and you count. A phone in your pocket, a watch on your wrist, earbuds, a laptop in your bag, a speaker in the kitchen, perhaps a robot vacuum under the sofa. Six devices that can hear you, signed into four accounts, carrying three assistants that have never met. On Sunday you asked the speaker to remind you about the dentist; on Tuesday the phone has no idea. The watch knows your pulse and nothing else. The vacuum knows the shape of your flat and reports it to a company you have never thought about. None of those devices is badly made. Each one is an excellent terminal for its maker. ## The real cause: the vendor chose the body Each device exists because a company needed a presence in that part of your life, and each arrives with that company’s account, that company’s cloud and that company’s assistant. The shape follows the vendor’s distribution strategy, and the assistant follows the shape. So you end up with as many partial assistants as you have brands, and none of them is yours. The fix is not one more gadget. It is to turn the relationship around: one assistant that is yours, and as many bodies as your hands actually need. ## Where one device for everything goes wrong **One shape for every job.** The phone is a compromise between a camera, a terminal, a wallet and a shop. It is slightly wrong for each, and most wrong for something meant to listen quietly and act on your behalf — the argument in [why a phone is the wrong body for an assistant](https://kyberdeck.com/blog/why-a-phone-is-the-wrong-body-for-an-agent). **Many bodies, many assistants.** The alternative most people end up with is a drawer of devices, each with its own assistant. Context does not carry across them, because no vendor has a reason to share it with another. **Identity issued by somebody else.** Every one of those assistants acts under an account a company can suspend, merge or sell. You do not have one identity across your devices; you have a list of logins. **Memory in the wrong place.** Carried devices are small and get lost, so the long memory goes to the vendor’s cloud, where it becomes their asset rather than yours. **Bodies you cannot open.** Sealed cases, locked bootloaders, no schematics. When a part breaks, you buy the next device. ## Five bodies, one system KyberDeck starts from the other end. There is one assistant, KyberBot, with one identity and one memory that belongs to you — the idea behind [one assistant, many bodies](https://kyberbot.com/blog/one-assistant-many-bodies). It runs on KyberLinux and moves between bodies the way you move between rooms. Each body exists because the hands are doing something different. **KyberDeck Card — presence and capture.** A card-sized computer on a lanyard with an e-paper display, microphones with a hardware mute and one physical button. It hears you, shows one line and knows who you are to the building. [The ID card argument](https://kyberdeck.com/blog/the-id-card-is-a-computer) is why we started there. **KyberDeck Band — when the hands are busy.** Voice and a glance on the wrist, a knurled crown for scrolling, haptics instead of sound, and a slider that makes it deaf. **KyberDeck Pocket — the cyberdeck.** A clamshell with a thumb keyboard and a wide screen for tasks that deserve them, and a terminal into your own systems. Small models run on it directly. **KyberDeck Node — the one that stays home.** Always on, low power, and the place your assistant keeps its long memory. It bridges the other forms and, only if you say so, lends spare capacity to KyberFusion. More in [the home node](https://kyberdeck.com/blog/the-home-node). **KyberDeck Core — a body that moves.** A compute module that slides into a robot, with KyberLinux and KyberBot on board, the safety envelope enforced locally and every motion logged. See [a robot is a deck with wheels](https://kyberdeck.com/blog/a-robot-is-a-deck-with-wheels). The same system runs on all five. That is less a slogan than a requirement: an assistant that has to be rewritten for each body ends up as five assistants again. [One system from the wrist to the rack](https://kyberlinux.com/blog/one-system-from-wrist-to-rack) explains how KyberLinux carries that weight. ## Buy it, or build it Every form is meant to be available two ways. Ready-made, once pilot units exist. Or built by you, from an open reference design or from a board you already own, with one of two SDKs: a microcontroller SDK for small things that listen, and a Linux SDK for anything that runs Linux. The weekend version is in [build your own cyberdeck](https://kyberdeck.com/blog/build-your-own-cyberdeck). The honest state of things: nothing is for sale, neither SDK is released, and every specification above is a design target rather than a measured result. Pocket is at prototype boards; the other four are in design. [The homepage](https://kyberdeck.com/) keeps that status current. ## A test you can run today Take yesterday and make a table with one row for every device that could hear you. Give it four columns: 1. Whose account does it sign into? 2. Which assistant does it talk to? 3. Where does what it heard end up? 4. Can you cut its microphone with a switch rather than a setting? Count the distinct names in the first two columns. If the count is more than one, your assistant does not have a body. It has a collection of rented ones, and none of them knows what the others heard. KyberDeck is designed to bring that count down to one. - form factor - KyberDeck - DIY - KyberBot ## Keep reading - [A robot is a deck with wheels](https://kyberdeck.com/blog/a-robot-is-a-deck-with-wheels) - [Build your own cyberdeck on KyberLinux in a weekend](https://kyberdeck.com/blog/build-your-own-cyberdeck)