TonUINO-TNG

Nice work. Although I'd probably had used one of the newer esp32 from seeed Studio with integrated battery pads (unfortunately the BatteryPal from PNLabs is still in the making). A DFPlayer Mini might also habe saved some time... There also is a german project called Tonuino, which is quite similar and has lots of examples and documentation - they even designed a custom PCB which unfortunately is no longer available: https://github.com/tonuino/TonUINO-TNG Another rasperry focussed project that has a web interface is Phoniebox: https://phoniebox.de/index-en.html There also is a toniebox hack, which lets you setup a self-hosted content server: https://gt-blog.de/toniebox-hacking-how-to-get-started/

There are several projects here in germany doing similar things. There is https://tonies.com, which is cloud based and pretty expensive, but hackable (https://github.com/toniebox-reverse-engineering/teddycloud). Then there is the RFID Jukebox: https://github.com/MiczFlor/RPi-Jukebox-RFID And Tonuino: https://github.com/tonuino/TonUINO-TNG I built ours with the RFID Jukebox and wrote a little tool called labelmaker to print labels for audio books and music: https://pilabor.com/projects/labelmaker/, but in the end it took too much time to print so many labels :-)

Great post, thank you. I had a similar experience a while ago and believe me that building such a thing is a SERIOUS investment in time - especially as a parent. While admiring the effort and the result, I can't recommend anyone to go for such a self-made device, if it is not for the learning experience and the fun of the project. I've built a "Phoniebox"[1] and a "Tonuino"[2] and both were used pretty heavily by my kids. The biggest issue I experienced is the "creation" of media. While this should be an easy task, it just takes it's time. Creating the cartridge, printing the image, copying the file, etc... As my daughter was getting older (>4) it was so much easier to just buy a CD Player and used CDs. In the meantime we use an old Smartphone (offline) as spare device with Audiobookshelf to sync the media locally and VLC Media Player to

If you are looking for a FOSS alternative to tonies, yoto and such I would also recommend the DIY TonUINO project. The boards are built into boxes, toys (from fire engines to plush) and whatever sparks imagination. https://discourse.voss.earth/t/tonuino-gehaeuse-galerie/786/... Most of the community speaks German, but there is also an English section https://discourse.voss.earth/c/international/11 The source code is in English and the schematics language independent. https://github.com/tonuino/TonUINO-TNG