Show HN: Marelleo, an open-source story box I built for my kids using ESP32

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.

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

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.

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 liked the look of your box too. Keep up!

Very educative, thanks for sharing the story!

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

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"?

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!

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!