Can Hackers Bring Jooki Back To Life?

March 30, 2025 by Tom Nardi 14 Comments

Another day, another Internet-connected gadget that gets abandoned by its creators. This time it’s Jooki — a screen-free audio player that let kids listen to music and stories by placing specific tokens on top of it. Parents would use a smartphone application to program what each token would do, and that way even very young children could independently select what they wanted to hear.

Well, until the company went bankrupt and shutdown their servers down, anyway. Security researcher [nuit] wrote into share the impressive work they’ve done so far to identify flaws in the Jooki’s firmware, in the hopes that it will inspire others in the community to start poking around inside these devices. While there’s unfortunately not enough here to return these devices to a fully-functional state today, there’s several promising leads.

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Yaydio, A Music Player For Kids

March 29, 2025 by Jenny List 6 Comments

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.

Custom Slimline CD Player Hides Out Under Speaker

March 27, 2025 by Tom Nardi 10 Comments

In the era of digital streaming, the market is full of wireless speakers that will play content from your smartphone or pull it down from the Internet directly over WiFi. But if you’re feeling a bit nostalgic and want to throw on one of your old CDs, well, you might have a problem. That’s the situation [Chad Boughton] recently found himself in, so he decided to build a compact CD player that could discreetly connect up to his fancy Klipsch speaker.

The optical drive itself was the easy part, as [Chad] already had a laptop-style drive in an external enclosure that he could liberate. But of course, the speaker wouldn’t know what to do with an external disc drive, so there needed to be an intermediary. Enter the Raspberry Pi.

It might not look like it at first glance, but that’s a Pi 3 tucked into the back of the 3D printed frame. It would have been too tall in its original configuration, so [Chad] removed the USB and Ethernet ports; a modification we’ve covered in the past. Of course, he still needed to use the USB ports, so he ended up soldering the two cables — one to the CD drive and the other to the back of the speaker — directly to the Pi.

When plugged into the Raspberry Pi, the Klipsch speaker shows up as a USB audio device, so the software side of things was relatively simple. [Chad] installed VLC to handle CD playback, but he still needed a way to control everything. To that end, a IR receiver hooked up to the Pi’s GPIO pins means the Pi can detect the signals coming from the speaker’s original remote and pass the appropriate command on to VLC. The whole thing is very well integrated, and you could be forgiven for thinking it might be some kind of stock upgrade module at first glance.

Despite recently celebrating its 40th birthday, the CD is unlikely to completely disappear from our lives anytime soon. Manufacturers can turn their back on the standard if they want, but so long as folks still want to play them, they’ll keep coming up with inventive ways to make it happen.

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Close up of a Sony FX-300 'Jackal' radio

Packing Even More Features Into A Classic Radio

January 17, 2025 by Heidi Ulrich 11 Comments

When it comes to hacking niches, breathing new life into vintage devices is always an exciting challenge. [t0mg]’s recent project exemplifies this with his 1978 Sony FX-300 ‘Jackal’ radio. He’d already upgraded the radio in 2021 and turned it into a feature-packed marvel, but there’s always room for improvement.

[t0mg]’s initial 2021 build had its quirks: noisy sound, a subpar display, and a non-functional radio module. Determined to enhance these aspects, he sourced an IPS version of the original 3.2″ ILI9431 LCD, significantly improving viewing angles. To tackle the audio issues, he integrated an M5Stack Atom microcontroller, utilizing its Bluetooth A2DP capabilities to deliver cleaner digital sound via I2S to the Teensy audio board. The Teensy itself got a complete wire overhaul just for the sake of good craftmanship.

The new setup also enabled the display of song metadata. Additionally, [t0mg] incorporated a dedicated Arduino Nano clone to manage inputs, streamlining the overall design. The revamped ‘Jackal’ now boasts a bunch of impressive features such as displaying RDS data for FM stations, voice recording, and an NFC reader for personalized playlists.

If you’re into radio makeovers, look into this post for a real golden oldie, or start out with the basics. For [t0mg]’s earlier improved version of this Jackal, read our article on it here.

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Laser Sound Visualizations Are Not Hard To Make

November 13, 2024 by Lewin Day 17 Comments

You might think that visualizing music with lasers would be a complicated and difficult affair. In fact, it’s remarkably simple if you want it to be, and [byte_thrasher] shows us just how easy it can be.

At heart, what you’re trying to do is make a laser trace out waveforms of the music you’re listening to, right? So you just need a way to move the laser’s beam along with the sound waves from whatever you’re listening to. You might be thinking about putting a laser on the head of a servo-operated platform fed movement instructions from a digital music file, but you’d be way over-complicating things. You already have something that moves with the music you play — a speaker!

[byte_thrasher’s] concept is simple. Get a Bluetooth speaker, and stick it in a bowl. Cover the bowl with a flexible membrane, like plastic wrap. Stick a small piece of mirror on the plastic. When you play music with the speaker, the mirror will vibrate and move in turn. All you then have to do is aim a safe laser in a safe direction such that it bounces off the mirror and projects on to a surface. Then, the laser will dance with your tunes, and it’ll probably look pretty cool!

We’ve seen some beautiful laser visual effects before, too. Just be careful and keep your power levels safe and your beams pointing where they should be.

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Pulley System Makes Headphone Cables More Managable

October 3, 2024 by Lewin Day 13 Comments

It’s 2024. You’ve probably got one or more pairs of wireless headphones around the house. [Barnso] prefers wired headphones with a long cable, but he also decries the fact that it often gets tangled in his chair. The solution? A pulley system to make everything easier.

The concept is simple. [Barnso]’s system uses three pulleys. The headphone cable goes to the PC, and then runs over the first pulley. It then runs under a second pulley which is free to move, but weighted so that it naturally wants to fall down under gravity. The cable then comes back up over a third pulley, and then runs to the headphones on [Barnso]’s head. Basically, it’s a super simple cable retraction mechanism that keeps the long headphone cable organized and in one place.

It’s nice to see a simple mechanism that makes life easier, particularly one that solves a problem so many of us have faced in real life. The construction shown in the video is almost (intentionally?) maddeningly hacky but it does the job. If you prefer to go wireless, though, we can show you how to do that too.

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Two hands hold a rounded rectangular case with a small lollipop-shaped cutout. The case is dark grey with a bit of white protruding between the two halves in the middle.

Add USB-C To Your AirPods The Easy Way

October 3, 2024 by Navarre Bartz 8 Comments

While the death of Apple’s Lightning Connector can’t come soon enough, swapping the ports on their products as “category-defining innovations” seems a bit of a stretch. [Ken Pillonel] has designed a set of streamlined, repairable, USB-C adapters for the AirPods, AirPods Pro, and AirPods Max that show Apple what innovation really means.

If you’ve followed [Pillonel]’s work in the past, you’ll know he’s as a big a fan of repairability as we are here, so this isn’t just a cheap knockoff dongle that’ll be in the trash as fast as your counterfeit wireless earbuds. In the video below, he walks us through his quest start-to-finish to design something compact that gives you all the joys of USB-C without the pain of buying a whole new set of headphones.

We like the iteration on the connector, showing that flexible circuits can do some amazing things, but are still subject to failure at extreme angles. Using a combination of 3D printing, a cool robot sandblasting machine, a pick-and-place, and some old fashioned hand soldering, [Pillonel] treats us to a polished final product that’s put together with actual screws and not adhesive. His designs are all open source, so you can DIY, or he sells finished copies in his shop if you want to give one to your less-than-techy relatives.

[Pillonel] may seem familiar as he’s the guy who added USB-C to the iPhone before Apple and redesigned the AirPods Pro case for repairability. Apple is getting better about repair in some of its devices, for sure, but unsurprisingly, hackers do it better.

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