This "Toddler Cyberdeck" Provides a Touchscreen-Loving Kid with Their Own Custom Media Remote

Pseudonymous maker "superwillis," hereafter simply "Willis," has designed a compact cyberdeck with a difference: it's designed to provide age-suitable curated entertainment to a three-year-old toddler — as a combination streaming remote and touchscreen busy board.

"So my three-year-old (almost three) toddler is way too good at using touchscreen devices and phones, and frequently gets on to YouTube where she immediately swipes her way into weird rabbit holes," Willis explains of the problem the device was designed to solve. "She also constantly wants to change the show herself and therefore prefers touchscreen like a phone instead of using a remote. So, I started building a tiny Roku touchscreen remote. Only the shows she likes, and a little digital remote screen too (if you swipe right)."

The heart of the build is a Waveshare ESP32-S3-TOUCH-AMOLED-1.64, an Espressif ESP32-S3-based all-in-one development board with full-color 1.64" touchscreen display. To this, Willis added a lithium-polymer battery and a 3D-printed "chunky fall-proof case" housing, producing a device a little like a bulky smartwatch. The software is split into two: a home screen provides large, colorful buttons to trigger playback of the kid's most popular shows; a swipe provides a simplified Roku remote with four-way navigation and an "OK" button for manual browsing.

The project is similar in concept to Guy Dupont's "IRL YouTube," which was similarly built around an Espressif ESP32 microcontroller as a means of providing a young child with self-directed access to suitable media — but which dropped the idea of a touchscreen display in favor of a physical binder of QR codes that could be scanned to initiate playback. Mads Chr. Olesen, meanwhile, opted for a more tactile approach for his kid-friendly streaming system by placing shortcuts to media on physical floppy disks that have to be inserted into a drive to begin playback.

More information is available in Willis' Reddit post; neither 3D print files now source code had been publicly shared at the time of writing.