We did last Spring. I shut down the colony over winter when the frogs were brumating, and should start it up again. I'm tempted to go with Dubia instead, but my husband has a real aversion to anything with "roach" in it's name.
There are plenty of guides online. Most say you need two bins. I find three work better-one to feed the frogs out of that's the right size for feeding, one where the eggs are incubating and hatching and the pinheads are growing to the right size to feed frogs, and one of adult crickets, chirping up a storm and laying eggs. The feeding bin and incubating/hatching bin rotate, as do the lay boxes. If you want to keep your bins going long-term, you will need a UTH or some heat source to incubate the eggs. Since my frogs don't eat much over the winter, I just let my bins shut themselves down as it cooled down, and will restart the lay bin with adult crickets (and am hoping that my last batch of eggs from last fall will hatch once it starts warming up) and bought the occasional batch of crickets to feed over the winter.
If you want the babies to grow, do not feed food designed for gut-loading with calcium-the shells get too hard and they can't molt. I only feed high-calcium food to the ones in the feeding bin, who are destined to be powdered and tossed into the frog tank anyway.
I use the gel water crystals-the ones sold for plants are cheaper than the ones sold for crickets, and are chemically the same stuff. Just make sure you get ones that don't have rooting hormone, fertilizer, or any other additives.
If he wants an insect protein source, he might be better off with mealworms (I've eaten chocolate covered toasted mealworms before-not half bad). Grain beetles reproduce easily and aren't noisy at all. In fact, I ended up with an accidental colony of them in my frog tank (and now bring some forward when I clean the tank, because they eat leftover cricket food, and my daughter tends to overfeed the frogs, which then leads me to feeding the feeders).
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