Comment by buran77
9 months ago
A couple of years ago, inspired bu the Tonie box, I built a similar yet much simpler device for a toddler in my family but without such a lofty goal of the learning experience.
I wanted to retain the same "always offline" and "physical" aspects of the experience. I used NFC labels hidden under the cover art label on old (edit: not SD) CF cards because I had a bunch of old ones around and they were all standard size and not easy to swallow. An internal microSD that held all the files needed. Plugging the cartridge in the fake socket which was actually just a hidden power on switch would trigger the playing of a specific file. It's a tad more maintenance heavy but much quicker to pull of.
That’s essentially what Tonie boxes do. They have internal storage and NFC stickers on the figurines. The box is then caching on the SD card and playing from their based on the ID on the NFC chip. If you take the box offline, it can still play the stuff on the box because of that.
With the very big difference that in my case it never needs to (or can, really) be connected to a network and someone else's service [0]. Only to the "parents' service", which was a more convoluted experience for them. They had to manually transfer the file to the internal memory, link it to the NFC label, and print an appropriate cover art label.
It was also interesting to see that when all the kids were gathering around with their toys they were all gravitating towards the one none of them had. But that was an unintended side effect.
[0] When I first heard of Tonies my mind jumped at the idea that the content is stored on the figurine and somehow wirelessly transmitted to the box. The child, parent, and engineer inside me were all thoroughly disappointed this is not the case, and even more so at the perspective of the service being stopped one day or who knows, monetized more aggressively.
There is one advantage of this though, via the tonie app you can change to separate episodes from the same series without buying additional figures. I'm a network security guy, somehow, and I'm sort of OK with the tonie box. Alexa etc, no way, but it seems not entirely bad.
We have a Yoto player, which works ina similarly (NFC chip as a “pointer into their web service, content cached on the device). I was pleasantly surprised to see that they promise that it’ll will work for at least five years after they stop selling the current version.
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