This Bunny Reminds Toddlers That It’s Night Time

It’s easy to spot recent parents, they are the people who look as though they haven’t slept in months. Sometimes the little bundle of joy responsible isn’t even a babe in arms but a toddler; old enough to wake up and find their parents for some solace but not old enough to understand that not everyone is up for being woken at 3 am. [Eyal] approached this problem in some style, by modifying a rabbit night light to indicate the time by changing colour, reminding the youngster when it’s a bit early to be rousing the grown-ups.

The bunny in question is a plastic moulding, sold with a white LED providing illumination, This was removed, and replaced with a rather nice custom PCB sporting a ring of addressable LEDs surrounding a Wemos ESP8266 board. In the darkest hours of the night, it is lit as a soft red to indicate sleep time. When an appropriate wake-up point is reached it bursts into a vibrant light show of many colours. Thus the recalcitrant early-riser can be taught to give Mum & Dad a little rest through the medium of light and colour.

This isn’t the first kids night light we’ve seen, indeed some of them have been rather elegant.

Baby’s First Jukebox Is Fun For Parents, Too

Believe it or not, there’s a $400 toy mp3 player out there for kids. It looks pretty nice, with colorful buttons and a wood console and all, but those features don’t really justify the price tag. [DerThes] wanted one for his 2-year-old anyway, so he made his own ruggedized version for a whole lot less.

The simple and kid-friendly interface lets [DerThes Jr.] choose from one of nine albums to play by pushing one of the candy-colored buttons. The bottom row of buttons handle play/pause and moving through the track list. When mom and dad get tired of listening to whatever the kids are into these days, they can enter the special god mode code to access 99 of their favorite albums.

This baby boombox is built with an Arduino Uno and an Adafruit music maker shield. [DerThes] etched his own PCB to hold the buttons and the pair of shift registers needed to interface them with the Uno. If you’ve never etched before, here’s a good chance to dip your toe in the ferric chloride, because [DerThes] has the transparency in his repo and a line on a nice instructional video.

If you don’t think your toddler is ready to respect a field of momentaries, you could make a jukebox with NFC blocks.

[via Arduino blog]

Toddler Jukebox Requires No Quarters Or Button Mashing

Ahh, toddlers. They’re as ham-fisted as they are curious. It’s difficult to have to say no when they want to touch and engage with the things that we love and want them to play with. [Shawn] feels this way about his son’s interest in the family Sonos system and engineered an elegant solution he calls Song Blocks.

The Sonos sits on a dresser that hides a RasPi B+. Using bare walnut blocks numbered 1-12, his son can use the Sonos without actually touching it. Each block has a magnet and an NFC tag. When his son sticks a block on the face of the right drawer containing embedded magnets and an NFC controller board, the B+ reads the tag and plays the song. It also tweets the song selection and artist.

The blocks themselves are quite beautiful. [Shawn] numbered them with what look like Courier New stamps and then burned the numbers in with a soldering iron. His Python script is on the git, and he has links to the libraries used on his build page. The Song Blocks demo video is waiting for you after the jump.

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