A birthday gift for my twin nieces, built on a Raspberry Pi. The governing design principle: every button does something, none of them are destructive. A five-year-old can just press stuff and discover what happens.

Features:

• Navigate photos with an Xbox controller
• Rotate images
• Add frames and stickers (unicorns, stars, the works)
• A dedicated button for silly sound effects

How it came together:

My brother suggested a digital picture frame so the girls could see photos from their new cameras on a "big screen." I found most digital frames boring, expensive, or subscription-dependent. I wanted something that felt more like an arcade game—interactive, playful, theirs.

I'd originally imagined building a full arcade cabinet, but with only a couple weeks I scoped it down to a web app running in kiosk mode, controlled with a gamepad. Claude Code handled most of the implementation; my role was often reduced to giving encouragement. The whole build took about as long as watching the Godfather trilogy, not counting a two-hour detour troubleshooting SSH that ended with Claude suggesting I go to bed.

The ease of this project convinced me that a lot of what we think of as "software" will soon be conjured up on the spot—built as a hobby, or even as a gift for one person.

The source code is available on GitHub.