Believe it or not, there’s a $400 toy mp3 player out there for kids. It looks pretty nice, with colorful buttons and a wood console and all, but those features don’t really justify the price tag. [DerThes] wanted one for his 2-year-old anyway, so he made his own ruggedized version for a whole lot less.
The simple and kid-friendly interface lets [DerThes Jr.] choose from one of nine albums to play by pushing one of the candy-colored buttons. The bottom row of buttons handle play/pause and moving through the track list. When mom and dad get tired of listening to whatever the kids are into these days, they can enter the special god mode code to access 99 of their favorite albums.
This baby boombox is built with an Arduino Uno and an Adafruit music maker shield. [DerThes] etched his own PCB to hold the buttons and the pair of shift registers needed to interface them with the Uno. If you’ve never etched before, here’s a good chance to dip your toe in the ferric chloride, because [DerThes] has the transparency in his repo and a line on a nice instructional video.
If you don’t think your toddler is ready to respect a field of momentaries, you could make a jukebox with NFC blocks.
[via Arduino blog]
> here’s a good chance to dip your toe in the ferric chloride
Errm, I wouldn’t be dipping *any* body part in the ferric chloride… Not unprotected anyway. That stuff eats copper for breakfast!
Fresh shouldn’t be a problem, it’s not corroding the copper it’s swapping with it, but then the HCl etc that gets made in the process will eat you. However, you can’t drink the stuff due to iron toxicity, which is probably a problem if you pained yourself in it, or soaked your jeans in it accidentally and decided to let it dry off, but dipping a toe, or finger, in fresh stuff should be fairly safe, unless you suck it clean.
Lookout, safety nazis inbound LOL… occupational exposure rules probably have you in grade 5 hazmat or something.
Meh, your blood contains iron and stomach HCl.
Not that drinking it sounds like a good idea. And it stains like a toddler with a marker pen.
But once it’s full of copper it’s nice and toxic.
“or soaked your jeans in it ”
Did you know that blue denim is dyed with used ferric chloride?
It is a nice build! The reason I bought the original one for my kids (not quite as pricey where I live though) is, I have three under the age of two. Simply no time for DIY projects at the moment… There is a kit version too, but it comes without the cute wooden enclosure, so really no point to that for me.
More toys need a special parents only God mode.
I’ll hack in a remote power off / volume control probably lol
We also wanted to built something cooler then the original „hoerbert“ for our little daughter.
So my father in law and I also built something similar but slightly different – the „hoerbaer“ (hear-baer).
https://github.com/sgacond/hoerbaer
We hat similar thoughts. Hoerbaer was not cool enough for the price and we wanted to build something, so my father in law and I made a “Hoerbaer” (german for “hear baer”).
https://github.com/sgacond/hoerbaer
Hello,
thanks for publishing your wonderful project.
A similar project can be found on my site:
http://pinguin.sauerland.de/mp3player2.html#mp3
Daniel
Beautiful hand crafted gift for the maker’s 2-year old. Well done.
TLDR; Rather than spend $400 on a store bought preschooler’s music player, this maker took the time to build a personalize version as a Christmas gift. The memory of doing it will last a lifetime rather be forgotten when the credit card bill is paid.
– Thomas
That looks brilliant! I’ve got a digitally contollable MP3/Ogg all-in-one board that’ just begging for a project to finally be used in. A jukebox for the kid should be just the ticket.