A family radio whose dial shows more than years. It shows your people: Grandpa’s 1956, Grandma’s summer of 1971 in her home village, and our son’s 2046.
Ages 8+ and the whole family · grandparents as co-authorsGrandma turns the knob to her own rider, “Grandma 1971”. Out of the static comes a radio report from her village: the host talks about a summer flood on the river, then says, “And now, someone who was there.” What plays next is Grandma’s own voice, recorded last week. She goes quiet, the kids stare at her, and she says: “That’s how it was.”
Turn the knob (drag it with a mouse or a finger, use the arrow keys, or the slider). Between stations there is only static. Near a family rider the signal locks in and a transcript of the broadcast appears. The static only makes a sound once you flip the switch.
Magnetic riders sit on the dial, one per family member (printed name tags: Grandpa 1956, Grandma 1971, Mom, Dad, Son 2017, Daughter 2020). The needle moves on a servo, and there is a YEAR knob and a STATION knob.
Tune to a year and you hear a broadcast built from a local database of that year’s facts (the Engineer agent’s design: the facts never come from the model).
A grandparent records a memory (2–3 minutes) on a web page of the Gateway, the home server on our Mac that every toy talks to. From the transcript and the year’s facts, Claude writes a period radio report, and the original recording plays inside it as the eyewitness. The station then stays on the dial for good.
The kids say what they want to be, and the radio broadcasts news from the year when they are grown up. Always with the “Fantasy Radio” jingle.
Press the button and ask the host of that era a question.
The radio tunes to a secret station (memory stations included) and the family guesses the year.
The dial fills up with family memories, and every visit from the grandparents adds a station. Guess the Year can fill a whole evening. The future station changes as the kids change their dreams, and in a few years it will be fun to hear what they wanted to be at nine.
Grandma’s two-minute recording becomes a period radio show within a minute, one that places her memory in the world of that year. This used to be a job for a sound engineer and a scriptwriter.
The cross-generational “object with a memory”, a pattern that came up in our research, is a family archive here, not a way to keep watch over the child.
| Part | What for | Price CZK | Source |
|---|---|---|---|
| ESP32-S3 DEVKit | the brain | 448 | electronics, section 4 |
| KY-040 ×2 | YEAR, STATION | 58 | #33 |
| SG90 | dial needle | 89 | #57 |
| A3144 Hall ×6 | senses where the riders sit | 180 | #21 |
| MAX98357 + 40 mm 5 W speaker | sound | 187 | #48, #50 |
| INMP441 + button | call the studio | 98 + ~40 estimate | #27 |
| WS2812 strip | dial backlight | ~60 estimate | — |
| Total | ~1,160 CZK (about €45) | ||
Sensing the riders’ positions with Hall sensors is optional; it is enough for the radio to know the years from its settings on the Gateway.
Boundaries: the only facts about the year and the memory are the ones in the database and the transcript, and code checks every event the script mentions. The model writes the style and the links between them. The grandparent’s voice is never cloned; only the original recording plays.
Every generated station is saved to the SD card, so after a few weeks the radio runs almost entirely offline. The future is always labeled as fiction. Sensitive years (1939–1945, 1968) get a factual tone and parental settings.
Compared with v1: a “history while you wait” toy has become a family archive that grows with every visit from the grandparents.
One of eighteen finalist toy ideas in the Toy Workshop, generated by AI agents, picked by a dad.
Made by Ondra Malacka with Claude agents · malacka.cz