I'm building a smart clock for my daughter. I don't want it to be a cool geek project, showing off all the things one could do with a small computer and a screen. I want it to have character and personality, with small little features built in, things that she will like.

I'm using a Raspberry Pi 3B with a UnicornHD HAT. Both outdated, but fine for what I'm building, and I like the limitations they impose.

The clock works. The color scheme changes from bright white-ish at noon to dim blue at night. The location is determined by looking up the gateway's IP. Then, based on lat,lon and time, it calculates the position of the sun, and adjusts the color/brightness.

There is also an indicator on the right, showing day/night/dawn/dusk hours which also adjusts automatically.

It can rotate, but I'll have to connect a gyrometer for this to work automatically. Todo.

Works as an AirPlay receiver using SharePlay, and will display artist/title when a track starts. Will add Spotify support too.

I asked codex to parse all my blog posts and get quotes that I have or I could have said, and I'll display them on random times. Needs work, and more personalization, these are intended to be from me to her. Will add some internal jokes, things we say to each other, and may also make some depend on day/time/season/weather. At first it looked like a cool idea, not sure if it will make it to the final version.

I don't want to rely on cloud services, this has to be self-sufficient. I'm currently looking up the network gateway's IP to determine the location using ipinfo.io but I'll find a way to either manually input it, or add a GPS module or something.

While doing various experiments, I got down the rabbithole of music boxes. It would be nice if it also worked as a music box, right?

And I found this amazing project I had no idea about, called Muro Box. Wow, so cool and so beautiful. This is the type of smart devices I would love to build some day, not consumer electronics, but things that are hand crafted, with character andattention to detail and beauty.

Muro Box lets you compose, play, and schedule your favorite melodies. With MIDI control and a patented mechanical design, a single music box can now perform unlimited custom songs—not just short loops.

Anyway, with this and that, I spent the last two days building a music box player. It's a program that will read a MIDI file, and play it as if it were a real music box, with a drum and a comb. I knew nothing about MIDI and sound engineering, but a learned quite a bit, and the result is not bad at all. I'll put it on GitHub once it's a bit more polished.