Understand what it is.
Four pages. Read the first two and you have the whole idea.
How it works
The shape of the thing. Your box sits between the kids' devices and the internet, the house never notices, and the parts of the network Genkan cannot see are named out loud rather than glossed over.
Why it's different
The feature tour. Age tiers, per-category time budgets, household roles, the firewall around the smart home, the dashboard, and the house bug bounty that turns "I bet I can beat it" into a lesson.
Learn to earn
The strongest part of the product. A curriculum with explanations on every question, study pages to read before a second go, a reading list that stays open when the clock is empty, and badges that no child can lose to a sibling.
Why it exists
It began as a switch to turn the wifi off without an argument, built by one parent for their own kids. The About page is the honest history, including the three decisions that have never moved.
Weighing this against something you could just buy? How it compares puts Genkan beside Firewalla, Circle, Gryphon, Bark and the open firewall platforms, and names the cases where a parent should buy one of those instead. It also holds the honest maturity gap: one household, one maintainer, and a repository only days old.
Both halves are live, with nothing to install.
An invented household on real code. No accounts, no sign-up, no data collected from you either.
The parent's dashboard
What a parent actually uses: a page per child, live traffic, the time budgets, the learn to earn settings, and the System page showing whether the box itself is healthy.
The page a kid sees
What comes up when the time has run out. Pick a quiz, read up first if you want to, pass a round, watch the minutes land. The quizzes are real and they are graded properly.
The source
Every line, MIT licensed. The quiz banks, the firewall rules, the grading code and the design notes explaining why each decision went the way it did, including the ones that were rejected.
A few evenings, and your agent does the hard part.
You need a spare computer, a second network port and an access point. You do not need to be a network engineer.
Get started
The shopping list, the two cables, and the four steps. You only type the fourth one.
Which Linux
What to put on the box, and why the answer is usually whichever one you already know.
Your AI agent
The install is a conversation with a coding agent, not a wiki crawl. Any of the common ones will do it.
The Switcheroo
Take over the household wifi without touching a single device: same network name, same password, new engine underneath.
The box is the beginning, not the end.
Cameras, home control, off-site backup, a voice that answers to your house. Some of that is being built and some of it is only a plan, and the roadmap says which is which.
Every capability, and its real status.
This is the table we would want to read before spending an evening on somebody else's project. A thing is only working if it runs today on an ordinary install.
| Capability | Status | Read more |
|---|---|---|
| Age-tiered filtering, one setting per child | Working | Age tiers |
| Time budgets by category, so gaming and video are metered and music is not | Working | Time budgets |
| Quizzes graded on your box, minutes credited the moment a round passes | Working | The loop |
| 42 quiz banks, 2,081 questions, every one with a written explanation | Working | The curriculum |
| Read up: a study page for every bank, showing each question, its answer and why | Working | Read up |
| 41 reference sites stay reachable when a child is out of time | Working | The reading list |
| Chores and jobs, claimed by a child, approved by a parent | Working | The loop |
| Ten badges, each measured against a child's own history | Working | Badges |
| The house board, four categories chosen so the youngest can lead one. Off by default | Working | The board |
| A parent writing quiz banks from the dashboard, stored where an update cannot delete them | Working | Write your own |
| Earn rates set per household and per child: the price of a pass, the bonus, the cooldown, the daily cap | Working | Write your own |
| Household roles, including a guest tier that does not need a new password | Working | Roles |
| Device claiming: an unrecognised device gets DNS, the portal and the safety net until somebody says whose it is. Off by default | Working | Whose device |
| A firewall around the smart home, so a camera talks to its maker and to nothing else. Off by default | Working | The smart home |
| The Switcheroo: take over the wifi without touching a device | Working | The Switcheroo |
| The dashboard: a page per child, live traffic, the weekly digest, a speed test | Working | The dashboard |
| The System page: whether the box itself is full, hot or thrashing | Working | The dashboard |
| The household bug bounty: beat the filter, show your working, win a prize | Working | The bug bounty |
| Paying more for new material than for the tenth pass of an easy bank | Not built | The limits |
| Difficulty tiers priced separately inside one bank | Not built | The limits |
| A per-child AI tutor. There is a briefing command and a runbook, and no service that runs on its own | Half built | The limits |
| Smart home control from the same dashboard | Being built | Roadmap |
| Cameras you own outright, watchable from away, footage held off the premises | Being built | Roadmap |
| Free off-site backup for that footage, on your own storage account | Being built | Roadmap |
| A voice that answers to your house instead of a corporation | Designed only | Roadmap |
| A tested list of hardware that cannot phone home | Planned | Roadmap |
| Guides, community and tutorials | Planned | Roadmap |
Three things are off by default on purpose. The house board, device claiming and the smart-home policy all change how the household behaves, so a family running happily today should never wake up to one of them switched on. Each is a deliberate flick of a switch, with the wording on the screen explaining what actually changes.