Nice work. Although I'd probably had used one of the newer esp32 from seeed Studio with integrated battery pads (unfortunately the BatteryPal from PNLabs is still in the making). A DFPlayer Mini might also habe saved some time...
There also is a german project called Tonuino, which is quite similar and has lots of examples and documentation - they even designed a custom PCB which unfortunately is no longer available:
This is incredible - I definitely wanted to do the same for my kid once he gets a bit older so I'm bookmarking this.
I read through the whole thing and found it informative, LLM or not. To all AI low effort naysayers I think for a working parent this maybe would not have been possible to write in reasonable time without the aid of Claude.
Wow thanks for the info about the toniebox reverse engineering!
My kids got offer a toniebox this year, and when discovering the product I was so upset about this locked and privacy nightmare I brought it back to the seller for a refund and started to look for alternatives (got time, still very young). Will check it out!
I loved the article. This is a project I've been wanting to do myself.
Fast dopamin? Did you read the article? I did. I think he mentions spending 3 months on this. Going from zero to hero on a project like this failed on 3 attempts, because figuring stuff out from forums alone is just way too hard.
Sorry man, but I really don't see your problem. A guy made something and wrote an article about making it. Did LLMs help? Yes, he's quite open about that. So what?!
I read it through. There have always been articles, even before LLMs, that exceed your personal "drivel" threshold, that you abandon. That's ultimately what matters, do you want to keep reading or not.
This is an excellent project! Congrats and thanks for sharing! (LLM writing notwithstanding)
I wonder if it would be a good base to create a kids phone / yogurt-cup telephone: no screen, no keyboard, just a box and figurines, and to call someone up you put the figurine on the box. It could be boxes-only (only people with a box can call or be called) or it could be more general: kids only have boxes and figurines, but the machine is able to call actual phones.
First off - well done, this is amazing. Secondly, it's a fascinating read how you basically figured it out, one mistake at a time, like not connecting or fastening the battery correctly. This is the way! We make mistakes and figure things out in our journey to make something interesting, and learn along the way.
I am mostly into software my whole life. I want to dabble with hardware and electronics in the future and this post taught me many things that’ll be very useful when I do.
Tnx for writing every bit of the building process in an easy to understand way and also open sourcing it.
This is really sweet. Reminds me of an old client I worked for called Museum in a Box (https://museuminabox.org/). It was started by George Oates (ex. Flickr).
3D printed figurines on top of a box which would activate museum style narration and multimedia. It was based on a Raspberry PI though which is different from this project but in many ways, it was the same.
love it! incredible! and you got it to work at first attempt!
i really need to start to find time to my own unfinished..or not started projects that are little bit similiar.
annd you made your own pcb?! what the actual .. i was thinking that's something you'll need to have years of experience and 5 revisions
I absolutely hate AI writing as well, but I suspect since the author is French, and the underlying code in their GitHub project [1] uses a lot of French naming, that it was more of a translation aid.
I wanted to give my three kids a screenless story box (inspired by the Toniebox gesture) but I was deeply annoyed by the closed ecosystem and subscription-like models of commercial alternatives.
So, despite knowing absolutely nothing about electronics three months ago, I decided to build one myself using an ESP32, an NFC reader, and a Bambu Lab printer. I learned everything the hard way, from accidentally creating short circuits to routing 491 tracks by hand on my first custom PCB with KiCad (and using Claude to double-check my math).
The box serves its own local web page to upload MP3s/M4As, streams web radios, and handles self-updates over Wi-Fi with a built-in safety net in case the network stack crashes.
Everything is fully open-source (firmware, KiCad files, 3D models under MIT license) on GitHub: link in the article
I’d love to hear your thoughts, feedback on the PCB routing, or answer any questions about the build!
I'm planning something like this. I already have Home Assistant with Music Assistant working, so playing radio and music and audiobooks in rooms are already possible with my phone. I plan to add ESPHome device with NFC reader to trigger plays so it's easy for the kids to use it. Just need to find where I left my roll of 50 NFC stickers.
One suggestion: In my opinion, kids nowadays are very familiar with charging devices with USB-C. Powering the device with USB-C will be much easier. Worse case scenario, I'll use some small portable power bank and place it inside.
Nice work. Although I'd probably had used one of the newer esp32 from seeed Studio with integrated battery pads (unfortunately the BatteryPal from PNLabs is still in the making). A DFPlayer Mini might also habe saved some time...
There also is a german project called Tonuino, which is quite similar and has lots of examples and documentation - they even designed a custom PCB which unfortunately is no longer available:
https://github.com/tonuino/TonUINO-TNG
Another rasperry focussed project that has a web interface is Phoniebox:
https://phoniebox.de/index-en.html
There also is a toniebox hack, which lets you setup a self-hosted content server:
https://gt-blog.de/toniebox-hacking-how-to-get-started/
This is incredible - I definitely wanted to do the same for my kid once he gets a bit older so I'm bookmarking this.
I read through the whole thing and found it informative, LLM or not. To all AI low effort naysayers I think for a working parent this maybe would not have been possible to write in reasonable time without the aid of Claude.
Kudos to the author.
_deleted_
Wow thanks for the info about the toniebox reverse engineering!
My kids got offer a toniebox this year, and when discovering the product I was so upset about this locked and privacy nightmare I brought it back to the seller for a refund and started to look for alternatives (got time, still very young). Will check it out!
Why the gatekeeping? It’s their choice how they spend their time and tokens, and nobody is forced to use it.
As long as they had fun and enjoyed the process, that’s what counts. Enterprise software deployment is a different story, of course.
TFA mentions this product in the first paragraph and how much the product sucks as the whole motivation for the project.
I loved the article. This is a project I've been wanting to do myself.
Fast dopamin? Did you read the article? I did. I think he mentions spending 3 months on this. Going from zero to hero on a project like this failed on 3 attempts, because figuring stuff out from forums alone is just way too hard.
Sorry man, but I really don't see your problem. A guy made something and wrote an article about making it. Did LLMs help? Yes, he's quite open about that. So what?!
Nice project but the writing smells so much of LLM that I didn't manage to finish the article
I read it through. There have always been articles, even before LLMs, that exceed your personal "drivel" threshold, that you abandon. That's ultimately what matters, do you want to keep reading or not.
This is an excellent project! Congrats and thanks for sharing! (LLM writing notwithstanding)
I wonder if it would be a good base to create a kids phone / yogurt-cup telephone: no screen, no keyboard, just a box and figurines, and to call someone up you put the figurine on the box. It could be boxes-only (only people with a box can call or be called) or it could be more general: kids only have boxes and figurines, but the machine is able to call actual phones.
I think even as an adult I would enjoy that.
First off - well done, this is amazing. Secondly, it's a fascinating read how you basically figured it out, one mistake at a time, like not connecting or fastening the battery correctly. This is the way! We make mistakes and figure things out in our journey to make something interesting, and learn along the way.
I am mostly into software my whole life. I want to dabble with hardware and electronics in the future and this post taught me many things that’ll be very useful when I do.
Tnx for writing every bit of the building process in an easy to understand way and also open sourcing it.
I liked the look of your box too. Keep up!
This is really sweet. Reminds me of an old client I worked for called Museum in a Box (https://museuminabox.org/). It was started by George Oates (ex. Flickr).
3D printed figurines on top of a box which would activate museum style narration and multimedia. It was based on a Raspberry PI though which is different from this project but in many ways, it was the same.
love it! incredible! and you got it to work at first attempt! i really need to start to find time to my own unfinished..or not started projects that are little bit similiar. annd you made your own pcb?! what the actual .. i was thinking that's something you'll need to have years of experience and 5 revisions
Inspiring product, thank you for sharing. How easy it would be to convert it so it accepts normal AA batteries ?
This seems like an interesting project but the Claude writing rubs me the wrong way. I couldn't finish it, unfortunately, but props for building it!
I absolutely hate AI writing as well, but I suspect since the author is French, and the underlying code in their GitHub project [1] uses a lot of French naming, that it was more of a translation aid.
[1] https://github.com/Zebra-Rodeo/marelleo
Yeah I think that's what happened. Still a bit unfortunate though for presenting such a nice project.
"You’re not buying a player, you’re buying a subscription dressed up as a wooden toy. And that genuinely annoys me."
had to stop reading from that point onwards.
Great job, this is really inspiring. How do you create the content for each of your kids?
Very educative, thanks for sharing the story!
There are some ugly tell tale signs of AI writing here: No screen, no menu, no parent [...]
You’re not buying a player, you’re buying a subscription [...]
I particularly hate the first one, don't AI sloppers notice how horrible it is to read "No x, no y, no z"?
Hi Hacker News!
I wanted to give my three kids a screenless story box (inspired by the Toniebox gesture) but I was deeply annoyed by the closed ecosystem and subscription-like models of commercial alternatives.
So, despite knowing absolutely nothing about electronics three months ago, I decided to build one myself using an ESP32, an NFC reader, and a Bambu Lab printer. I learned everything the hard way, from accidentally creating short circuits to routing 491 tracks by hand on my first custom PCB with KiCad (and using Claude to double-check my math).
The box serves its own local web page to upload MP3s/M4As, streams web radios, and handles self-updates over Wi-Fi with a built-in safety net in case the network stack crashes.
Everything is fully open-source (firmware, KiCad files, 3D models under MIT license) on GitHub: link in the article
I’d love to hear your thoughts, feedback on the PCB routing, or answer any questions about the build!
Please don't use any LLM to write about your projects in the future.
https://martinfowler.com/bliki/LLM-Voice.html
I'm planning something like this. I already have Home Assistant with Music Assistant working, so playing radio and music and audiobooks in rooms are already possible with my phone. I plan to add ESPHome device with NFC reader to trigger plays so it's easy for the kids to use it. Just need to find where I left my roll of 50 NFC stickers.
One suggestion: In my opinion, kids nowadays are very familiar with charging devices with USB-C. Powering the device with USB-C will be much easier. Worse case scenario, I'll use some small portable power bank and place it inside.
Très cool ! Si tu es sur Paris et que tu veux lancer un petit workshop pour apprendre aux autres à le faire je suis partant haha
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