The box, before it exists
Presence-based playback, the read debounce, resume, and a card carrying three books. These are the decisions that make the toy feel right, and none of them need a soldering iron to get wrong. Put a card on the nest.
put a card here
idle0:00
Reader conditions
Turn on flaky reads and watch the debounce hold the card present. Without it, a child leaning on the table stutters the story.
Cards on the shelf
What the box is doing
State
…
What this is faithful to
- Presence is the play state. No play button. Card on plays, card off pauses and saves — and the saved position is per card, so a card put back tomorrow resumes.
- Three missed polls before “gone”. The reader is polled at 8 Hz and RF reads drop. Believing the first miss would stutter constantly; the debounce is the difference between a toy that works and one that seems haunted.
- A card is a playlist. The six-book card and the one-book card differ only in the length of an array — that is what a pointer buys.
- The volume pot has an end stop that a child cannot get past. Buttons do not, and a four-year-old finds the top of a button range on day one.
Not faithful: the audio is a tone, the reader is a timer, and nothing here has to fit in 320 kB of RAM. The interaction is the point.