5 Years Making a Toy with an SDK | Hacker News Reader

5 Years Making a Toy with an SDK

benhansen.io

5 pointsbenhansenslc5 comments

Hi HN,

After working as a SWE in tech and finance for 7 years I quit my job to work on a programmable kids toy. Its something I wanted for me and my kids and hopefully some of you will find it interesting. Let me know if you have any questions.

there's a lot of toys with buttons and sounds, it's kind of incredible no one has thought to make a programmable one before, looks great!

+ once kids grow out of thinking of it only as a toy, they might be ready to be shown how it works and how they can create their own functionality and games, so you're hitting a lot of bases here, well done

Thank you very much! I kept waiting for someone else to build it but that never happened so here I am.

> they might be ready to be shown how it works and how they can create their own functionality and games

Yes. I want to help enable that too. For example, I want to do a Scratch integration at some point.

I can even see a world in which a parent repurposes it to become a programmable panel of buttons to control their home or do other random stuff (less toy, more screenless tablet, as you outline on the site) (which would be hilarious, parents stealing and repurposing their kids toys lol)

do you think you could use more and longer videos of showing the thing on the site? the current one does a decent enough job I guess but maybe room for more marketing and hype there? fingers crossed for this project, love to see people with skills like these putting them to use creating joy in people's lives rather than just droning away at BigCorp year after year

I agree a longer video would be helpful. I am going to do an explanatory video at some point where we walk through the device, switching activities and playing a few of them. A more hype video would be nice too, although we probably won't budget that until we start shipping though.

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