Soothiebox
White noise seems to calm babies and help them sleep. At some point you are desperate for anything that seems like it will help them sleep. So I started working on a small box to generate various kinds of soothing noise.
The electronics are a handful of off-the-shelf parts: an Adafruit HUZZAH32, a MAX98357A I2S amplifier, and a small 4 Ω / 3 W speaker, plus a 10 kΩ potentiometer for volume, a rotary encoder to change noise mode, and a power switch.
The firmware is built on Zephyr. It renders 48 kHz audio over I2S/DMA, with procedural sources (white noise, pink noise, wind, night drive, womb) and a few Opus-compressed loops stored in flash (water, vacuum, Brahms lullaby, shushing, Clementine, fire crackle, West Side Highway traffic, and organ music).
I made an enclosure from some oak floorboard scraps I found in the trash:
The top has a simple chip-carving design. I’m bad at it, but I learned from my father, who learned from his grandfather, and it adds a little decoration. After assembly I finished it with Minwax tung oil finish, which warmed up the grain nicely:
In addition to the built-in noises, the firmware also advertises a Bluetooth A2DP sink, so you can connect to it and stream anything from your phone.
