A box styled like an old cassette recorder sits in the kitchen. Anyone can tell it one sentence about their day. Every Sunday it prints a chronicle of the week, and every December a medal.
Put a token on the reader, press the red button and the box records one sentence (in the demo the sentences are pre-written). Go through the week, then print Sunday’s chronicle. Anything in the archive can be deleted, and in December the box turns the quote of the year into a medal.
Audio and the local transcript. A parent can delete anything.
Only the transcribed text goes to Claude, never the audio. In the toy Claude writes the chronicle and picks the quote; the demo uses sentences written in advance.
My 6-year-old daughter puts her token on the box, holds the red button and says: “Today I learned to whistle!” The box blinks, and that is all. On Sunday morning the thermal printer prints “The Chronicle, week 39”, with a quote of the week at the bottom. In December Claude picks the quote of the year, code puts it into a medal template with the year in relief, and the printed medal ends up under the Christmas tree.
Each entry takes a minute a day. Something comes back every week, every month and every year: the Sunday printout, the monthly PDF, the medal. The value grows the longer the box sits in the kitchen, because the pile of chronicles slowly turns into a family history nobody had to sit down and write.
AI does the boring part: transcribing, sorting by person, writing it up. What comes out is on paper and shared by everyone in the house.
MemPal and Finding MeBo are memory aids for seniors; this box is for the whole family, and children’s voices are never processed in the cloud: whisper.cpp transcribes them on the Mac, and only the text goes to Claude.
Building it takes a weekend.
| Part | What for | Price (CZK) |
|---|---|---|
| ESP32-S3-DEVKit + INMP441 microphone + MAX98357 + arcade button (the voice core, without its speaker) | records a sentence while the button is held | ~680 |
| RC-522 NFC reader | knows whose token it is | ~55 |
| 4× NTAG213 | family tokens | 48 |
| CSN-A2 58 mm thermal printer | the Sunday chronicle | 928 |
| 9 V/2 A power supply | for the printer | ~150 estimate |
| microSD card (8 GB) | buffers recordings while the Mac is unreachable | ~100 estimate |
| Total | or about 1,000 CZK (about €40) if it shares the printer with the Morning Ticket, another toy idea that has one | ~1,950 (about €80) |
Gets only transcribed text. Once a week it writes the chronicle, sorted by person, and picks the quote of the week; once a year it picks the quote of the year. It never talks to the children.
Records, keeps the archive, deletes whatever a parent asks it to, lays out and prints the chronicle and fills the medal template. The audio never leaves the house.
Recording works offline: the ESP32 buffers on an SD card and sends everything once the Mac is reachable. The AI never talks to a child; the box only records. Audio goes only to the Mac, where whisper.cpp transcribes it, and only text reaches Claude. The data lives at home, and the keys and the delete button belong to a parent. A week of chronicles costs about 2 CZK.
First playable prototype: tokens, recording, local transcription and the Sunday printout.
The monthly A4 PDF and the December medal from the OpenSCAD template.
Nothing here has been built yet; the toy is still an idea.
One of sixteen finalist toy ideas in the Toy Workshop, generated by AI agents, picked by a dad.
Made by Ondra Malacka with Claude agents · malacka.cz