After having our son, my partner wanted me to make her a memory box where she could keep all the trinkets and keepsakes from his birth.
As it is something of an old stereotype that such things would be kept in an old shoe box, I wanted to mimic that aesthetic.
The box is made from iroko, sides of approx 1cm, joined with box joints.
The base is simple hardboard, rebated into the sides.
I didn’t really want to add hardware such as hinges as I felt it would detract from the shoebox aesthetic, so I opted for a simple lift off lid.
The lid itself is made from a thicker piece of iroko, with trim added around the edges.
In order to provide a good friction fit, a piece of plywood, wrapped in t-shirt fabric, matching the boxes internal width and depth was added to the lid. This holds the lid on without rattling around, and incidentally hides the “bonus feature” of the box.
The bonus feature
Of course I can’t do anything normal like just make a box.
During his first few weeks, whenever our son sneezed, he would follow it up with a little noise that sounded like he was saying “oh..”. Of course it was incredibly cute and a memory we want to cherish forever.
What my partner didn’t know at the time, is I had managed to catch this on video, and I wanted to surprise her with it.
A few years ago (around 2015-2016 I think), Sainsburys brought out a Christmas biscuit selection box which included a gadget for recording a message that would play when the biscuit tin was opened.
Somewhere along the line somebody I know must have got one, I scavenged the gadget from the tin once it was empty, and it spent the past few years sat in my electronics junk drawer, waiting for a project to be used in.
First thing to do was to drill out the rivets and get rid of the dead batteries.
Rather than replace them with more button cells, I opted for wiring in a AAA battery holder, I just had to follow the PCB traces and connect it at the right point.
The microphone is pretty much as crap as you would expect for something of that size in a ostensibly disposable product, so I needed a better way to record the audio.
To do that I replaced the microphone with a 3.5mm jack and coupling capacitor. Once I’d copied over the recording, I removed that as well to save space, and also removed the record button to avoid overwriting.
Then it was simply a matter of hiding the electronics in the box. This was done by carving out a hollow in the middle of the lid. The ‘inner lid’ of plywood that was also used to create a friction latch, added sufficient depth to the lid in order to hide the battery and PCB.
![]() |
The underside of the lid with hollow for PCB/battery and speaker. |
The t-shirt fabric that covered the inner lid also hid the circuitry, while also allowing enough light to pass through to activate the recording.