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Story mixing desk · 4 channelsLive story · ages 5–12
Toy concept · ESP32 + four faders + NFC hero

Story Mixing Desk

A fairy tale you mix with faders while it plays. Push spookiness up and the next paragraph gets darker; pull it down and the sun comes out.

  • Ages 5–12
  • 10-minute bedtime story
  • ~1,300 CZK (about €50)
  • No microphone
A small printed mixing desk with walnut sides: four colored faders with ghost, smiley, music note and clock icons, lit LED columns, two amber VU meters, a speaker grille and a hero figurine standing in its slot
CH 1

Mix a story

Put the hero in the slot, press Play and move the faders while the story runs. Each paragraph is written with the settings of the moment it starts; the tags under a paragraph show what the desk sent. Try the 6-year-old’s profile with spookiness all the way up.

Hero slot
Age profile
2
2
2
3

STORY · TOM AND THE CAVE

The story appears here, one paragraph at a time.

What the desk sends to the Gateway for the next paragraph 
{ }

Waiting for the hero.

CH 2

Two kids, two faders

How an evening goes

  1. 1A child puts the hero figurine in the slot (it carries an NFC tag) and presses start.
  2. 2Four faders: spookiness, silliness, rhyme and length. A column of LEDs next to each one shows its level.
  3. 3Mid-story, my 9-year-old pushes rhyme up. The next paragraph opens with So Tom set off through the wood, met a bear on a bike (as bears never should)…
  4. 4His 6-year-old sister pulls spookiness down. The narrator: A shadow in the cave? Oh no, it was just Uncle Badger with a lantern.
  5. 5Drop length to the minimum and the story wraps up within two paragraphs.

Why a tenth time

The child hears the result of moving a fader almost straight away, in a story that has never been told before. Tonight it rhymes and turns silly, tomorrow it creeps along with the lights low.

Siblings can share the desk with one fader each: one pushes spookiness up, the other pulls it back down, and the story follows both of them.

ON AIR · WHAT AI ADDS

The story reacts to a hand on a fader

Mixing tools that steer a text by mood exist as research prototypes for adult writers. Here a child hears the consequence of the move in a live story. Without a language model the toy could only switch between branches recorded in advance. The same idea, a physical control steering the mood of a story, later went into the Fairy-Tale Barrel Organ.

CH 3

How it’s built

Sloped deskA mixing-console body with icon labels printed in MMU colors: ghost, smiley, note and clock.
Fader capsFour printed caps in the channel colors.
Hero slotA pocket for the figurine with the NFC reader underneath.
Speaker grillePrinted into the desk front.
PartWhat it doesCZKPrice
Output core: ESP32-S3, I2S amplifier, speaker, buttonplays the narration~730concept figure
4× slide potentiometerthe four faders316catalog, 4 × 79
RC-522 readerrecognizes the hero figurine~55catalog
4× WS2812 strip, 8 LEDs eachlevel columns~100estimate
USB-C powerno battery–
Parts above ~1,200 CZK · concept total ~1,300 CZK (about €50)~1,300
Architecture: the desk reads the four faders and the hero figurine and sends levels to the Gateway on the Mac; code turns each fader into five levels and cuts spookiness to the age cap; Claude writes the next paragraph while the current one plays; Piper turns it into speech locally; a fader moved by more than one step makes the Gateway throw away the unfinished paragraph and start again Desk (ESP32)faders + hero NFC Code on the Gateway5 levels, age cap Claude (model)paragraph N+1 Code: moved > 1 step?bin draft, start again Piper TTSon the Mac Speakerparagraph N

CODE DOES

  • turns each fader into one of five levels
  • cuts spookiness to the age profile’s cap, whatever the fader says
  • throws away the unfinished paragraph when a fader jumps by more than one step

THE MODEL DOES

  • writes the story one paragraph at a time, with the levels it was given
  • never decides how scary the story is allowed to get
CH 4

Safety and offline

The cap lives in code

For the 6-year-old, spookiness 5 is really 3. The prompt never decides the limit, so no wording can talk the story past it.

No microphone

The kids steer with faders and a figurine. Nothing in the desk listens.

Works offline

Piper speaks locally, and 30 pre-generated stories in three spookiness levels sit ready. Without the internet the fader switches between versions paragraph by paragraph.

Speed and cost: Claude Haiku writes a paragraph in about 1–2 seconds, which is shorter than reading one aloud. A whole story costs roughly 0.3–0.6 CZK.

CH 5

Roadmap

First playable prototype · a weekend

Desk + offline stories

The printed desk, four faders with LED columns, the hero slot and the 30 pre-generated stories switching by spookiness level. The whole toy is rated as a one-weekend build.

Full version

Live paragraphs

The Gateway writes each next paragraph from the current fader levels while the previous one plays, with the age cap and the restart rule in code.