Here’s something a bit sappy. My four-year old son has a best friend who is moving away. He’s sad and she is sad about it, so I wanted to do something about it.
I built two ESP8266’s with a matrix LED screen, that connects to Wifi and CloudMQTT. Whenever one of them pushes a button on their device, a little heart lights up on the other one’s screen for about 5 seconds. According to my son, that means he misses her. (hence, miss you machine).
In our end we connected it through Home Assistant and it has a little sound and a light come on whenever she pushes the button, just so he can run into his room and push the button back. Saying he misses her too. It’s really quite sweet.
That’s so sweet of you. Your project reminded me of something I’m currently setting up for my little niece who lives far away but always wants to talk to me. It’s called talkiepi and it’s basically a modern walky-talkie using a mumble server. Maybe you build two of them for your son and his friend so they just have to press a button and can talk to each other. It works really well and it consists only of off-the-shelf components:
Wow! I am just starting experimenting with ESP8266 and examples like this are the best way to encourage people into understanding possiblilies beyond just turning table lamps on and off… Thank you for sharing.
