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!

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 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!

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"?

Great job, this is really inspiring. How do you create the content for each of your kids?