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.
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 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.
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.
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!
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"?
[1] https://github.com/Zebra-Rodeo/marelleo
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!
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.