Comment by scosman
9 months ago
This is brilliant. Great design and great work. I love that the cartridges actually hold the content and aren't just NFC tags.
For lazy parents like myself: check out a Yoto player. It's web-connected, has limited internal storage, and the cards are just NFC cards -- but it is easy.
Actual cartridges makes sense if there are other players, otherwise a PCB and SD card seems like a huge waste over a nfc card that costs a few cents.
I'll be building a few of these for the kids in the neighbourhood. I hope they'll start swaping and trading like we did with our Gameboy games.
It's just damn cool and worth the $2. Plus more reliable, no syncing, no web-connection. New content is just new content. Not how you'd build it at scale, but that's kinda the point.
Bonus: The yoto a nice 'normal' bluetooth speaker, as well.
We have a Yoto and it's okay, but my complaint is how difficult it is to get custom stuff on there. The "record-your-own" cards are expensive (and often unavailable, like during this past Christmas season), and off-the-shelf NFC cards don't work perfectly (you have to ensure the content is downloaded onto the device before a generic card will work for that title).
it does take a surprisingly long time for the device to download the content for offline use, but my only real complaint is that I can't self host the server side (it seems to do some ssl certificate pinning or something similar).
My kids love theirs, and we get tons of comments from other parents since they'll happily listen to stories on them instead of begging for a screen.
They swap cards with their friends, and so long as its on a wifi connection the first time the card is inserted, the local storage is plenty enough to keep the cache there for offline use.