A Music Box Commanded By NFC Tags

[Luca Dentella] recently encountered a toy, which was programmed to read different stories aloud based on the figurine placed on top. It inspired him to build an audio device using the same concept, only with music instead of children’s stories.

The NFC Music Player very much does what it says on the tin. Present it with an NFC card, and it will play the relevant music in turn. An ESP32 WROOM-32E lives at the heart of the build, which is hooked up over I2S with a MAX98357A Class D amplifier for audio output. There’s also an SD card slot for storing all the necessary MP3s, and a PN532 NFC reader for reading the flash cards that activate the various songs. Everything is laced up inside a simple 3D-printed enclosure with a 3-watt full range speaker pumping out the tunes.

It’s an easy build, and a fun one at that—there’s something satisfying about tossing a flash card at a box to trigger a song. Files are on Github for the curious. We’ve featured similar projects before, like the Yaydio—a fun NFC music player for kids. Video after the break.

7 thoughts on “A Music Box Commanded By NFC Tags

  1. This is the third NFC-controlled music player in a week. Not that I’m complaining but it is weird how often this is coming up lately.

    Now I’m wondering if I should make one for my elderly parents.

  2. A really cool project from Lucas (I love his Italian accent in the video), but I suspect he had a lot more fun making this children’s game than a child will have playing with it.

    A bit like a father with his kids’ electric train toy… :-)

    1. Yes, the builder has probably more fun building it than the intended users

      I was looking for children’s audio player, but did not like (due to lack of time and untested materials) self-build ones. Using NFC seems to be common.

      I found this one in germany, which uses Hats (which are USB storage devices) and the elefant as a player. You can load your music on the hat via USB cable: https://technifant.de/kinder-musikbox/technifant

      You can hot-swap hats. Each hat has 2GB FAT storage capacity. Downside: putting mora than 100 files onto a hat has rendered a hat unsable (it was not even recognized by Linux or Windows)

      I like this idea, since you can compose a playlist on a hat and don’t need access to the main device.

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