A card you can flash, and a version number.

Today the project got a name and a version number. It has been called audio_player since July, and now it’s named after the kid it was built for. The version is 0.1.0. It’s pre-release, but it’s the start of tracking progress officially: from here on, I can watch the project move through version numbers, not just through the code changing.

The bigger change is setup. Until this week, setting up a player meant an afternoon of typing commands into it. Now a build writes out a ready-made memory card: flash it, put it in, plug in the player. That’s the plan, anyway. The first card doesn’t boot into a working player yet, and it took Claude and me two days and a dozen small fixes just to get the build to finish. None of it interesting. All of it necessary. A player I can’t set up in minutes is a player I can’t send to another family.

The red box with its light on, December 29, 2025: the player the card is for.

An open question: three buttons may be too many. The big one, for play, pause and volume, is right. Next and previous are the doubt, because there’s a next track and a next show, and one button has to mean both. For now, a short press on next skips a track and a long press skips to the next show. Previous works the same way, a short press for the previous track and a long press for the previous show. The layout stays until a kid proves it wrong.

Next: a website with a waitlist, so there’s somewhere to send people. And a plan for the four weeks to go-live, with a family trip to Yosemite in the middle.