Grigri story player
completed / abandonedAn ambitious, hardware and software project to build an open source children music and story player. Inspired by Lunii.
Notes
This project is one of the most ambitious I've ever taken on. It involved hardware and electronics design, embedded software for ESP32, local-first web applications, community animation, fundraising, and even communicating with a Chinese factory.
After writing and rewriting the Lunii admin software, I was going deep on kids audio players. Different companies have produced their own over the years (there are more than 5 options in France for quite a niche market), but none seemed open enough to be used without the vendor marketplace. I guess the real money is made selling the content, and the player is often a vertical integration play by the publishers.
Rather than playing cat and mouse jailbreaking platforms, I wanted to offer an open-source, easily produced alternative. So came the Grigri project.
I regularly have IoT or embedded personal projects, mostly based on ESP32. So I thought: how hard would it be to create a simple audio player, with good battery life, speaker and headphone jack, Bluetooth and Wi-Fi, a screen hidden behind plastic (following Lunii's ergonomics) and a nice web app to manage it all?
Turns out it's pretty complicated.
Project details in progress