### Music you can hold My son suddenly became interested in music around his 4th birthday. I'm not sure what clicked, but I think it may have been his ability to listen-to and understand the lyrics in real-time. So I wanted him to have a great experience with music. But I wasn't ready to give him a device. I wasn't excited about him doom scrolling through 4 second audio clips, or just letting AI-driven playlists cheapen the pleasure of finding and treasuring music. It was also important to me to give him agency rather than gate-keep the playing of music behind my device. On the other hand, I suppose that I did want to gate-keep a tiny bit... *I hate kids music with a passion*. I started to hunt for something *tactile*, like tapes or CDs... until I realized I didn't need it to be retro, I just needed it to be value-aligned. My first thought was to build something with a raspberry pi and an NFC tag reader (part of me still wishes I had... I often miss working on embedded software...), or perhaps a QR code reader. I ended up coming across a set of hacker parents in Germany that had been working on making the tonie box value aligned. The great thing about the tonie box is that kids love it - it is well constructed and approachable. It has voice recording for any error, and clear and friendly instructions when the battery is low. But the awful thing is that it's locked into a cloud service, and you have to pay for both action figures and songs from a limited library of junk. yuck. But the idea of a liberated tonie box is perfect. The hardware is great, it has an integrated NFC tag reader, It is cute, it has decent battery life, and the music is stored (cached?) on a local SD card. All the "UX" is highly polished. So then the work to do is to (a) replace the cloud service, and (b) replace the action figures. The whole process is not for the faint of heart, but after a handful of late nights I had replaced the Certificate Authority on the ESP32 and my replacement back-end was working! The custom back-end is called TeddyCloud. It allows you to curate a library of songs (converted to the toniebox audio format), and to associate them with NFC tags. One gotcha I didn't quite expect was that the NFC tags required are hard to find -- I ended up ordering them from Germany. The result is exactly what I was hoping for. He listens with agency and ownership. He is the DJ at the dance party. We love it. The Tonie box: ![[toniebox.png]] ### Resources #### Toniebox hacking https://tonies-wiki.revvox.de/docs/how-to-get-started/ #### Compatible RFID tags I ordered from [RFID Friend](http://rfidfriend.com) #### Teddycloud Container My [[Teddycloud]] docker-compose file.