Music consumption has followed a trend over the last decade or more of abandoning physical media for online or streaming alternatives. This can present a problem for young children however, for whom a simpler physical interface may be an easier way to play those tunes. Maintaining a library of CDs is not entirely convenient either, so [JakesMD] has created the Yaydio. It’s a music player for kids, that plays music when a card is inserted in its slot.
As you might expect, the cards themselves do not contain the music. Instead they are NFC cards, and the player starts the corresponding album from its SD card when one is detected. The hardware is simple enough, an Arduino Nano with modules for MP3 playback, NFC reading, seven segment display, and rotary encoder. The whole thing lives in a kid-friendly 3D printed case.
Some thought has been given to easily adding albums and assigning cards to them, making it easy to keep up with the youngster’s tastes. This isn’t the first such kid-friendly music player we’ve seen, but it’s certainly pretty neat.
This is literally a clone of the yoto player.
An astute observation. Does that matter? Good ideas (having a physical token to select a song or book, and having no screen) often result in both closed/commercial products and open source hackery. I’m happy someone did this: i was also looking for something similar, without an ecosystem that will inevitably collapse a few years down the road.
The knobs on my kid’s Yoto stopped working a few months after we got it. And he likes to listen to music on a loop overnight. Several days a week I was woken up at 2am to him screaming the music had stopped. (did it crash?)
It’s a shame because it looks pretty solid inside. Uses an ESP32.
Nicely done, good BOM, nice files. Yes, an open clone of a closed project. Very very nice. No possibility of some corporation monitoring your kids playtime or taste, no bricking.
IIRC the “first” NFC I can recall for a kids toy was different “foods” (cardboard steak, plastic eggs?) that kids could cook on a play stove. Each “food” was NFC chipped and the stovetop made different noises for different foods. Anyone else remember that?
my kids had a toy that had animal halves that you could somehow slot onto it, and if you put the two halves of an animal together then it would play that animal’s song. if you mix-and-matched animals, it would play different noises. “a horse pig?? that’s funny!!” or whatever. it worked by a pattern of bumps on the bottom of the animals that depressed buttons. so as the kid tires of the original functionality, they can explore it and find the buttons and figure out how it works.
mixed feelings that the newer generation of toys are more like magic
Wondering if this could be done with a simple app on an old smartphone that is probably already laying around. Ideally with a complete lockout function and an admin token/password.
Also curious why all the NFC when punch cards would probably work just as well 🤷🏼♂️
Obviously as a little project to experiment with NFC it makes great sense.